Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘quiet living’

Cardinal Sin

Posted in Culture, tagged , , , on 14 Apr 2024| 4 Comments »

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been two weeks since I last went to work . . .

In recent conversations with my sister, the word “shirking” was mentioned a few times. Growing up, shirking—the avoidance or neglect of duty—was Mortal Sin #1 in our mother’s book (followed closely by “imperfect result or performance”). Every day, every waking hour, was to be filled with purposeful activity. Productivity was the point. Recreation (where allowed) usually had a secondary educational goal.

My father was not as involved with this mindset. Though he worked long hours, and his off-days were regularly spent making repairs, improving our home, keeping cars in tune, and such, his recreation had no ulterior motive. His enjoyment of the 49ers’ football games was pure, and I long suspected that the point of his lazy Saturday’s spent surf-fishing was not, in fact, to catch fish.

But Dad’s counterpoint to Mom’s stricter zeitgeist really didn’t stand much of a chance and, in the end, didn’t make a dent in our training. As a result, my sister and I always and still find it difficult to stand down, take a breath, chill, relax. Everything must have a goal, a purpose.

Two weeks ago, I retired, ending forty-six years of employment, and in the time since, I’ve been busy. I’ve been doing chores (cooking, groceries, paying bills), handling situations (rolling over the 401(k), confirming insurance switchover), and even embarking on some larger projects (traction strips for the front steps, installing new raised beds). But I’ve also (usually at my wife’s suggestion) been taking time to enjoy some shows, read a little, and take walks. I thought I was doing pretty well.

But last night, my brain screwed up and showed its hand.

I was in bed, prepping for sleep and took a few minutes to plan the next day’s activity. The internal dialogue went something like this:

• Okay, tomorrow’s Sunday; the weather is supposed to be fine—mostly sunny, high of 62°F.
• Don’t want to waste the weather; outdoor activity should be a priority.
• I could work more on the front steps, scrape and grind to prep the surfaces.
• Should also see if we have any of that paint color left . . . Adirondack Brown, was it?
• Don’t want to get too deep into that. Don’t start anything that can’t be left for a while.
• Hmmm, what? Why?
• Only one day to spend on it; gotta go back to work on Monday. It’s been a nice two-week break, though.

At this point I heard/felt a click, in my head, like a physical switch being thrown.

Brain, you’ve been busted.

My subconscious had obviously not gotten the memo about our retirement; it was still operating as if I was only on vacation. It’s as if, deep down, I don’t really believe I’ve retired. That, or retirement is just too foreign a concept for my lizard brain to comprehend.

So, subconscious and I had a conversation wherein we discussed both the nature of forever and the fact that not every moment needs to have a goal.

Obviously, this is going to take more time than expected to truly sink in. The longest time-off I’ve ever had was a three-week vacation, so as far as I can tell my subconscious is now working on that premise, and we’ll need to have a similar conversation next week. But if that’s needed, we’ll have it, and again the week after, if required.

I’ll get there. Even if I have to drag my subconscious along, kicking and screaming.

k

Read Full Post »

The Last Weekend

Posted in Culture, tagged , , on 24 Mar 2024| 1 Comment »

This is my last weekend. Ever.

From tomorrow on, I will merely have days, each barely distinguishable from the next, one after the other, days that form weeks, which form months, which in turn form years, onward, until I eventually end. The reason? This coming week is my last week in the work-a-day world, and as of this Friday afternoon, I will have retired from my 33-year stint at my place of employment.

We could have a semantic disagreement about the definitions. Some will feel that the weekends will always be weekends, fenceposts on the calendar of life, regardless of what activities I might (or might not) use to fill my weekdays. Others will say that I will have nothing but weekends, back to back, or that I’ll be on one very long weekend.

These definitions and outlooks have merit, in that they make logical sense within their framework, but for me, they just don’t feel right. For me, a weekend is the break between work-weeks, the time when one kicks back, tackles larger projects, gets together with friends, runs errands. I’ve long been one of the “early birds” at work, starting at around 6 AM, and I’ve been in the habit of “front-loading” my work weeks, working longer days Monday thru Wednesday, so I can shave an hour or so off my Friday, which when combined give me a jump-start on the weekend, giving me more like two and a half days for each weekend. And, of course, there’s the weekly case of Sunday-Night-itis, usually creeping in sometime Sunday afternoon, that dread knowledge that the weekend is almost over and tomorrow it’s back to the grind. This is what a weekend is, to me.

And this is my last weekend. Ever.

I expect I will be relying on the wall calendar more, checking the “day of the week” sub-dial on my old wristwatch, and of course, peeking at the time/date display on my phone. Because even though I will no longer have weekends, per se, the date still matters, and the day of the week still matters (especially on Garbage Night).

I’m not sure how I’ll structure my time, going forward. Will I plan? Will I occupy myself with whatever catches my fancy? I’m curious to see what works and what doesn’t.

However it works out, I know it will work out. Forty years ago, my wife and I devised a plan, and for forty years we worked the plan, and now we’re at the finish line, ready to reap the plan’s reward.

Excitedly, I repeat my mantra: Onward.

k

Read Full Post »

Drifting

Posted in Creativity, Culture, Poetry, tagged , , , , , on 22 Feb 2024| Leave a Comment »

the percussive exuberance
of K-drama dialogue
drifts down the darkened hall
a cryptic lullaby in
rollercoaster tones
leading me past
anxious abstraction
to plush midnight

(more…)

Read Full Post »

Pole Reversal

Posted in Culture, tagged , , , , , , on 29 Jun 2023| 7 Comments »

I’ll be honest. Death has been on my mind. For a while.

This is not unusual for someone in their early-mid-sixties (i.e., me). In the past decade, my folks died, my brother died, and friends have died. Others we know in our cohort are battling cancer (successfully, we’re glad to hear), surviving strokes, and dealing with the trials of getting older. It’s not like I thought I was immortal, before—I always knew I’d die, someday—but it just wasn’t ever . . . real, y’know? It was an eventuality, but never registered on my radar.

Well, for the past few years, it has been a distinct blip on my screen, and it is now impossible to ignore.

And again, to be honest, I’ve lost sleep over it. A lot of sleep. How long do I have? What quality of life awaits me? What am I doing to improve what’s ahead? What am I doing that is eroding my future? What can I change? What benefits will they bring, and what costs, and would they be worth it?

It always hit me at about 4AM, too, and thus, the lost sleep. Which probably didn’t help things. Vicious circle.

I’m nine months from retirement—the final act in my grand opus—and I am definitely looking forward to it. Except, that is, for all the fretting about mortality.

But (oh, come on; you knew there was a “but” coming) then I remembered something I wrote, a passage from The Year the Cloud Fell. In the opening scene, the heroine is fighting the onset of a vision. She is afraid of it, and she is struggling against it. Her grandmother is at her side, and counsels her to give in, to accept what is inevitable.

“If you fight it, you will only get sick.  Then you will have the vision, and you will be sick, too.”

I realized that I was only compounding my problems. Yes, I am mortal. Yes, I am going to die. Yes, I am powerless in the face of that inevitable outcome. And all I’m doing with this fretting and “what if”-ing is making it worse. I’m stealing time, from myself.

The magnetic polarity of Earth flips every couple hundred thousand years or so. But it isn’t like flipping a switch. It’s not like, next Tuesday, we’ll wake up and all our Norths will now be Souths. It takes time. It’s gradual. It staggers around, meandering closer and farther from true polar coordinates until, after a few thousand years, our magnetic north is somewhere in the Antarctic.

This shift within me, it’s kind of like that. Seeing each day not as another step on the path to decrepitude and demise, but as a finite commodity to be cherished and enjoyed, it takes time. And effort. I have to choose to see it in this light. And yeah, I fail, and it’s usually around 4AM when I do fail, but I’m failing less and less.

My days don’t have to be stellar, red-letter days to be precious. Just the sight of a wild rabbit in the back garden, the smell of petrichor, learning something new, a hearty laugh are each more than enough to make a memorable.

Gratitude for the gifts nature has given me—breath, life, senses, emotions—make each day worth the trouble.

Onward.

k

Read Full Post »

I’m All Outta Hate

Posted in Culture, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , on 15 Jun 2023| Leave a Comment »

Here, in the middle of Pride Month and with Juneteenth just a few days away, I began asking myself some questions, and in ruminating on one question, I landed on a surprising (to me) answer.

Maybe it’s because I’m old. Older. Calmer. With a longer view. More experience from which to draw and evaluate. Maybe.

Or maybe I just had an epiphany. A light-bulb moment—not in the sense of a sudden idea, but more like, Hey, I turned on the light and now I can see what was hiding in the shadows.

Or maybe it’s merely because I asked myself a question that I’d never asked before, never even thought of before.

Regardless of the why, the fact is that I did ask myself a question.

The question: What good is hate?

We all have emotions. It’s in our nature. We love, we fear, we get angry and happy and sad, and we hate*. If I were to posit factors common to them all, I would say that these emotions all
(a) cloud our rational judgement and
(b) have an upside.

Except hate. I just don’t see an upside to hate.

Love definitely clouds our judgement, blinding us to flaws, but it helps us bond and work for mutual benefit. Fear has obvious irrational downsides, but “the gift of fear” is that it can alert us to dangers of which we might not be cognizant. Anger, happiness, sadness, they’re more subtle, but the same factors apply.

Except hate.

I see no benefit to hate. There’s no “gift of hate,” no advantage it bestows that might counter its many and obvious drawbacks. Hate only clouds our judgement and makes it easier for us to do harm, wish ill, lash out, fight, hurt, kill.  Hate allows us to impute to others fictitious motivations, fueling our righteous anger. (Those immigrants aren’t coming here to steal your job. They’re just trying to make a better life, live in a safer place, or escape danger, just as you would.) Hate allows us to justify wrongs and persecute others for being different. (Someone who dresses in different clothes, loves a different type of person, or speaks a different language is not trying to make you do the same; they just want to live their life their way, not yours.)

But there’s nothing I do that requires hate. There’s no action that is instigated or accompanied by hate that I can’t also do without hate. I can dislike or avoid people, I can try to change a person’s mind or the way a system works, I can prosecute and jail someone for breaking the law, I can battle a foe with political or (if necessary) physical force, all without hatred. It could also be argued, that I might do all of those things better, more efficiently, absent any feelings of hate, as my judgement would not be clouded by passionate emotion that lead me astray.

There is so much around us today that is seeded in fear and fed by hate—of minorities, of LGBTQ+ folks, of immigrants, even of women—that it’s difficult to get to the core of any of it (much less all of it). I’m not saying we don’t have issues and problems that need to be resolved (we definitely do); I’m saying that it’d be a helluva lot easier to address those issues and problems if we didn’t hate so much. Hate is counter-productive. It only heightens confrontation, diminishes understanding, and leads to brute force methods when ratiocination would almost always provide a a better outcome. Hate is counter to peace.

People will disagree with me on this. Definitely. And if someone can point to an actual benefit for hate, please, shout it out. But saying that “it’s in our nature” isn’t a good enough reason to engage in it. To quote Rose Sayer (from The African Queen, 1951): “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

k

.

* In researching for this post, I asked “How many basic human emotions are there, and what are they?” The answers varied, of course, but in general they listed between four and seven basic human emotions. What I found surprising was that neither love nor hate were on the lists, even though (to me) they seem the most human of emotions.

Read Full Post »

Evanescent

Posted in Poetry, tagged , , , , , , on 08 Jun 2023| Leave a Comment »

he took the time
looked up at day’s end
at sun-fired clouds
watching
slow subtle shifting
rose red orange
spark flame ember
glowing rusting cooling

he took the time
enjoyed the splash
of shadowed flights
on the sunset canvas
hard-edged jetliner dark-winged crow arrow-fast songbird
from farthest to nearer to near
all the layered worlds
sunlight to twilight
that lay between
his eye and the heavens

he took the time
not for the beauty
filling the space
between his heartbeats
but to give time its due
not to be spent filled wasted
but lived in
a constant transition
a string of nows
reaching
from dark to dark
without end

Read Full Post »

Sunday Morning v Friday Afternoon

Posted in Culture, Music, Seattle, tagged , , , , , , , on 05 May 2023| 1 Comment »

There’s a song that’s been on my mind lately. It’s called “Sunday,” by Les Friction†, a group that’s been on my tight rotation playlist‡ ever since I discovered them in 2011.

I love this song for several reasons. It starts out with a distinctly “Eleanor Rigby” vibe—a string octet playing a clipped ostinato with a tin-can percussion back—a lovely ariose melody drifting downward from the opening notes, singing of how “she” always wakes up late on Sunday mornings, takes her coffee, and heads out the door to a street populated by flower vendors and serenity. The lyrics take a turn toward longing, a searching for love, and feelings of hope, as we wander (at least in the music video that plays in my head) the streets, down from the Pantheon toward Notre Dame. And then BANG!, a chorus with full orchestra, chimes, and a pulsing rhythm section. Another verse and back to the chorus, followed by a 4+2 instrumental bridge that throws in strings and brass (clarino trumpet!) and even a glockenspiel (I’ve always been a sucker for a well-placed glockenspiel part), all building building building to a climax that breaches heaven before it stops . . . and the Rigby octet returns, recapitulates the quiet opening notes, and fades out to silence.

At its heart it is a love song, complex in structure and orchestration, but simple in its message: two souls seeking, destined to meet, to find, and to share the rest of their allotted time, to “live like every day is Sunday.”

Yeah, I’m fond of the song.

It has been, ever since I first heard it, how I’ve imagined my retirement. Living like every day is Sunday. Lazy Sunday. Sleepy Sunday. The Day of Rest.

But ever since I broached the T-minus one year mark toward my impending retirement, that outlook has changed. Sunday? Every day like Sunday? No. The closer I get to my last day of work, the more I have come to appreciate not Sundays but rather, Friday afternoons. (I mean, let’s be honest. Sundays come with some baggage. Sure, it might be a day after all the errands and have-to’s are done, a day when you can sleep in a bit, but it’s also a day that comes with the knowledge that the morning brings a return to work, a malaise we here call “Sunday-night-itis.”)

Friday afternoon, though—especially if you get off work a tad early—it comes with a feeling of freedom, of release, of celebratory drinks and the promise of the whole weekend ahead. If you manage it right, a properly used Friday afternoon can make it feel like the first day of a three-day weekend. Yeah. Friday afternoons are great, and while I won’t complain of the occasional lazy Sunday type of day, given the choice, I’d like to live each day like it’s Friday afternoon, with all the joy and hope and expanse of future time that it brings to bear.

Oh, I still love the song “Sunday,” and I’ll listen to it over and over in the coming years, but it is a song that speaks to the time-sense of the working stiff.

And in relatively short order, I won’t be that.

So, I’ll take Friday afternoons, please.

And thank you.

k

† Les Friction is an outgrowth of the group E.S. Posthumus (also on my tight rotation playlist), formed by the Vonlichten brothers, Helmut and Franz. The sound they created was heavily orchestrated and driving, used for many movie trailers and the NFL on CBS theme. After Franz’s sudden death in 2010, Helmut eventually returned to music and created Les Friction.

‡ Other similar groups on my tight rotation playlist include Two Steps from Hell, Thomas Bergersen, and Jo Blankenburg. Just sayin’.

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »