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On wading in: Day 10. Doing what you love.

Quick post, because I’m running between things…things that I love!  And I just wanted to revel, just a tiny bit, in the fact of this privileged state of doing what I love.

I get to do some very cool public humanities projects right now, and I had one lunch meeting and one phone meeting and some engaging prep work and reading on that today.

I get to play a leadership role in a very awesome and important board in my area and learn from fascinating, experienced people, and I’m off to chair my first meeting of said board.  It’s such an honor!

And what’s funny here is that I spent the first, oh, nearly forty years of my life carefully saying no to things that didn’t seem lucrative or productive or fun…and I didn’t have nearly good enough vision to judge.  Both of these opportunities are things I might have said no to at one time for one or another of those reasons, but here I am, loving them and loving being right in the thick of them.

This little blogventure is another of the things I’m doing that I love, as is the whole parenting-family-gardening-cooking-household-management thing…and indeed, the trick here may be, as wise folks have said, not just doing what you love but loving what you do.  In fact, here’s a tale of how I learned that last part:

I’ve had lots of years of schooling at fancy places in what’s called “literary criticism,” and indeed, as you might imagine, that means I’m wicked good at seeing the flaws in things.  My innate pragmatism and competence have led me to work where I not only SEE the flaws but get to work on understanding them and even perhaps fixing them.  But I only got to that last part because I learned to love the process, to love the THINGS, flaws and all.  One of my least-favorite courses involved lots of touchy-feely participatory process, and one of my classmates noted that my comments were always about shortfalls, hypocrisies, failures.  Of course, I responded: that’s what critique is.  She asked me then what I might be missing when I only looked at the bad stuff.  I gazed mildly back at her, waiting for the punch line.  It took me a while to get it.  (I’ve since learned that this is about asset-based as opposed to deficit-based vision, but I persist in thinking, with her, that it might be a little bit about love.  About generosity.)  So I’ve been experimenting for oh, fifteen years or so with the loving part, and it’s hard.  But surprise of surprises, it seems to work.  Love works.  Generosity works.  And our work works better when we can bring those to it.

On wading in: Day 8. Coming to rest.

It’s Sunday, which is sometimes conceptualized as a day of rest.  Those of you with small children may feel free to take a break while you laugh.

There.  Better?  Right.

At our house, Sunday is what we call a “whole family day,” which is much bally-hooed for its tendency to involve intricate train-track development sessions or reading marathons.  But it also tends to be a kind of painful day for us grown-ups, because it feels like our last chance to get things done.  So this morning is a good example: I’m running around trying to finish washing windows and start some other projects while Len entertains the beasts.  It’s not satisfying but it feels necessary.

So I got to thinking about “necessary.”  About my own capacity to over-do.  About the other kinds of satisfaction we need, besides clean windows.  (“Clean”: this is the first time they’ve had their outsides washed in eight years, and we maybe get to the insides every three or four years, so, well…there it is.)  My point is that I have a hard time prioritizing rest.

“Rest” itself is a kind of a squishy concept.  Sleep: sure.  Laying down with a good book: yes.  Watching an episode of something fun on Netflix: I can’t tell anymore.  I think that’s rest, but then it never makes me feel rested.   Going for a walk in the woods: yes, though for the opposite reasons.  It is not really rest but it makes me feel rested.  It rests my soul.

And perhaps that’s the crucial distinction these days.  Perhaps our bodies (or at least, at this point in time, my body) can handle a lot more than we think they can, and perhaps the kinds of rest we need are heart-rest.  Spirit-rest. For some people, that might mean church or some other kind of organized faith community; for some of us it might mean listening to the rain on the roof or sewing something or taking pictures of flowers your son brought in yesterday.

Any way you slice it, the hard part for me may not be resting per se.  It’s COMING TO rest.  I get to moving pretty fast, especially in the mornings, and especially when I have the bit between my teeth.  To know that I should rest, to schedule rest and plan for it and intend to take it: these are things I can do.  But to actually stop, to put down the sponge or the computer or whatever it is and intentionally CHOOSE rest: that’s hard.

So that’s my intention for today.  To honor the many forms of rest (including love and creativity and conversation with friends and making pie) and to choose them over the many forms of busyness.  To catch myself in the busyness and to gently let it go.

On wading in: day 6. All the things.

So today was one of those days where the best you can do is coast. The intentions fall by the wayside (funny how none of them involved the reality of a post-vaccine 20-month-old nipple leech). There’s no room for reflection. The best I can hope to do is notice when I yell at all the grumpy children and leave the room for some quick deep breaths. Then: back into the fray.

So what have I learned from this little episode wading into the whitewater?

1. Edamame (in pod) are the perfect food for a three-year-old. They squip everywhere and are delicious and nutritious; Ezra was helpless with laughter at their antics. Plus, it made him want to help serve his brother. Ha.

2. Chalk is not a comestible.

3. I have no problem medicating (mildly) an obscure but persistent misery in my kids. Hey, he had a vaccine. Chillax.

4. Dessert beer is a category.

No wisdom here. Just moving with the current. You?

On wading in: Day 5. Quieting the critic.

The problem with having an active, well-educated brain is that you tend to use it more often than you need to.  You tend to think of it as a problem-solver…of ALL problems.  But in my reality, that brain causes a lot of problems, too, and I need to be careful how I use it.  (And when.  Mindfulness practice mostly happens at 4 am here at my house.)

Example: yesterday’s hopes for “going under.”  I enjoyed the day, but I wouldn’t describe it as immersive.  I stepped from stone to stone across the river rather than dive right in.  Which is fine.  I mean, I’d like to have accomplished more, but it was fine then, and it’s fine now.  And that fine-ness, that relaxation with how I’ve been doing, is what enables me to keep moving forward. (And trust me, this is an atypical response.  I must be growing up or something.)

Here’s a more typical pattern (see if you recognize any of this!):

1. Make a vast and impressive list of really critical things to take care of;

2. Spend most of the available time alternately re-organizing the list and eating chocolate on the couch;

3. Accomplish one important thing off the list and get halfway into another;

4. Spend the next three days in an analytical downward spiral over why I never get anything done.

My physical therapist is trying to convince me to use a lacrosse ball to release trigger points in my back.  You stand with your back against a wall with the ball between you and the wall and you roll around, leaning on the ball.  It’s transformative.  It’s painful.  It’s illuminating.  And, apparently, it’s necessary, because you can’t really strengthen muscles that are all tied up in knots.

See where I’m going with this?  A relaxed, forgiving attitude toward failure turns out to be not only not a problem — it’s a positive solution.  That’s right.

And if you get your head around that before I do, let me know.  I’m still working on it.  But I realize it’s true, my BODY knows it’s true, even though (because?) it gravitates against most of the self-evident “truths” we get taught: that lists are made so we can check things off; that our job is to check off as many of them as we can; that discipline is next to godliness (or something); that NOT checking things off constitutes failure; that failure is bad.

Today, instead, I’ll try these on as truths:

1. Lists are made to help us see clearly our commitments and desires.  It’s a vision exercise as well a form of task management.  I need to know which is which.

2. Our job is to live wholly and well, fulfilling our many commitments and desires (listed or unlisted) over time, and that may mean RESTING.

3. Discipline is useful and necessary and it is also a skill we practice and, at times, eschew.  We get to be the deciders.  And we can TRUST ourselves, trust our desires and whims.   Discipline alone is only one avenue toward achievement.

4. A revolving to-do list may indicate failure — but of which kind?  The delicious kind that suggests we had much, much better things to do, which have filled us with glee?  The painful kind that indicates we had to spend our time doing things not on the list (doctor’s visits, soothing troubled children, plumbing)?  The mundane kind that tells us we really don’t WANT to be doing the things on the list, and maybe we’d do well to delegate or let go?  The terrifying kind that might tell us the list is not specific enough, since we’re totally paralyzed and overwhelmed?  The exhilarating kind that means we’re onto something big here and a list will never contain it?

5. Failure is not bad.  It means we’re learning something.

“SEE?” my inner critic gloats.  “You USED me for this, and look how much it helped!”

“Yes,” I say.  “Thank you. Now go lie down.”

On wading in: Day 4. Going under.

But not in the bad way, not like you’re thinking.  I mean it as in swimming lessons, as in my three-year-old who loves the water but is afraid to put his face in or actually go under.  (Not surprising, considering his first total submersion in conscious memory involved falling off a dock…)

I mean it in the sense of this extended metaphor, that life itself is this vast and beautiful body of water and we dip our toes.  We wander along the strand.  I’m working on wading all the way in, and what I find is fear.  Not of drowning, per se, since I’m awfully good at survival, but of never wanting to get out.  (Here my fellow Mainers are laughing heartily, since the waters here are COLD.  Staying in is not a winning proposition.)  But you hear what I’m saying.

I know artists (of many stripes: academics, builders, designers, cooks, writers, painters, photographers, etc.) who get so immersed in their work that it’s hard for them to resurface.  They skip meals and neglect their families and commitments, or at least experience transitions back to dry land a little like a fish: there’s gasping and often a little thrashing about.

I am afraid of that.

I LOVE the work I am doing — the reading, the writing, the scholarship, the design; the complexities of play with children; the management of many lives.  But I’m always afraid that if I dive right in to the art, to “my work,” I might not be able to come back. And I NEED to come back.

This is where you’re wisely examining my metaphor and saying, “But Anna, who said you had to look at life as a matter of safe, dry land (dry in every sense) versus joyful, life-giving sea?”  And you’re right.  It’s a false binary. But for survival-oriented kids, and perhaps anyone taught that creativity and contemplation were wasteful, it’s reasonable to see a divide.  So here I am.

The intention today, then, is to put my face in the water.  Perhaps even to try going under.

On wading in: Day 2

I’m enjoying the fact that Day 2 is September 2nd…and also painfully aware that when I miss a day, we’ll all know it.  But hey.  This little practice is more for my benefit than yours, so perhaps I’ll be the only one to care.  (Assuming you can live through the agony of missing a post from me…I know, I know.)

Today was a mixed bag of a day.  It was our second Sunday and it sure felt like it.  (Explanation: when I was an academic, someone once explained to me that the summer months could be best understood if labelled as weekdays: June is the Friday night of summer; July is Saturday; August is one long Sunday.  Sunday always involves a little relaxation and introspection, but it’s mostly filled with housework, homework and dread.)  We had this beautiful gift of a four-day weekend, and I was all giddy with a sense of possibility before I realized a) it would rain the whole time; b) we had no plans and it was Labor Day weekend; c) we don’t really have disposable income at this time; and d) we have tons of stuff to do around the house.  So we decided to make it a staycation of sorts, with predictable results.  We loved having two Saturdays (I lobbied briefly to call it three Saturdays and one Sunday, but let’s be real) and used them well, with a picnic by the river and lots of fun garden time.  There was picking of homegrown veg (based on Alice Waters’ Simple Food refrigerator pickle recipe), singing, dancing, and a whole lot of important house and yard work.  But today the rain was INTENSE, and we loafed about all morning and then spent the afternoon with friends we haven’t seen in ten years.  Which was satisfying in itself.  And now…and now…

Here I am, trying to imagine what this project of wading in means.  Partly, it seems to mean paying attention to things so that I can develop a habit of living in the moment and recollecting it with some reasonable calibration to reality.  That’s not a strength of mine.  I notice the dramas: the joys and failures.  I tend to discount the mundane.  But in life with kids, the mundane is kind of the point. It’s the source of the joy.

All this is reminding me of this brilliant new series I’m creating (and scholarship I’m writing) for the Maine Humanities Council on the agrarian novel.  It’s not much of a category in the US, you see, though it should be.  It’s farm literature that illustrates a love of the land, a reverence for the ordinary, an appreciation of people and nature and the routine, miraculous systems of nature.  It tends to be skeptical of gimmicks and passers-by, preferring deep roots and time-tested solutions.  It pays attention, sitting quietly for a while to make room for the wise, the funny, or the beautiful.  Just in case they show up.  That’s the kind of approach I’m trying to take to my life these days…and it’s nice to be living it even as I let my ever-scrambling intellect go play with the abstractions.  Gene Logsdon says “firsthand experience” is the difference between the agrarian writer and the writer; I’d argue, today, that firsthand experience is the difference between happy living and muddling through.  Not just HAVING the experience, but showing up for it.  Being present with it, sharing it with others, and remembering it as best you can.  These are my work, today.

What’s yours?

On the restlessness

You know the restlessness I mean.

The one that shows up at inappropriate times, times that you’d been looking forward to, like vacation or other brief eras of freedom in the midst of our pressured lives.

It’s a sudden and unwelcome thing, the byproduct, perhaps, of a sudden sense of possibility and too many ways to take it.

I myself have done a surprisingly good job staving off that restlessness after my decision to devote the fall (at least) to not teaching.  I have a bunch of other projects and a much larger pile of hopes and desires, and now, two days after submitting summer grades, they all seem elusive.

I’m back to unpleasant chore lists (call and haggle with the health insurance company!  Clean the basement!) interrupted by occasional fits of checking out (complete with Netflix and chocolate cake).  This is not what I had imagined.

The amusing part is that it IS, in fact, exactly what I had foreseen, and I’m only really surprised that it took me this long to fall in the hole.  I am a structure person, you see, and I seem to do best when I have clear windows of time and neatly delineated tasks.  Getting comfortable with freedom, in fact, is my greatest struggle.  And it’s one I’m diving into today.

How’s that going?  you might ask.  Well, there’s tea and chocolate; there’s a measure of compassion; there’s a great deal of planning.  There’s even quite a bit of productivity.  But I have this illusion that the in-between times are also somehow supposed to be Perfectly Satisfying, that we move fluidly from Great Achievements to Profound Relaxation.  And back again, of course.  And that’s a bit tricky.  So overall, I’m trying to be happy with the long to-do lists that aren’t getting done (let’s be real: they are less lists and more repositories of all the many things in life and work that need to be done, unsorted by priority or purpose).  Indeed, I’m rather proud of myself for Doing Things and then, if they weren’t on the list already, putting them down so I can cross them off.

But I’d like for the FEEL of these days to shift.  Perhaps I’ll try a project-based approach, where there’s a little task-time but most of it is devoted to a particular project.  Or maybe I’ll get into Pomodoro, or some other time-management strategy.  It’s delightful that I have the freedom to try it a couple of days a week.  Now the hard work is quieting the guilt and managing the expectations.  But we’ll be fine.  Right?

On carnage

(And for those of you from war-torn parts of the world, please understand I mean no disrespect when I use the term “carnage” in the context of these very first-world problems…but carnage it is.)

So today I learned that squirrels are nest predators.  They eat (and by eat, I mean kill, disembowel, distribute widely, and eat very little of) baby robins.  Who might be, say, nesting on my pergola under the grapevines.  Right near my deck.  Where I’m finding their dismembered bodies.  The greatest mercy here (to me) is that my sons neither found any of the carnage nor know of it; the greatest mercy I hope for (for the robins) is that they were all killed at once.  I will stop that train of thought right there.  I want you to sleep tonight.

These are the same squirrels, I might add, who in previous years would dig up tulip bulbs in order to take single bite and then leave the damaged, useless remainder right on the bench where I like to sit.  Len was once actually mooned by a squirrel (I confess, he had just been throwing walnuts at it), but that was in Iowa.  These East Coast squirrels just give you the finger and eat everything you care about.  And they all seem to have gone beserk at once: we coexist peacefully for most of the year, and then all of a sudden they kill all the baby birds AND remove a full third of the peaches, still green on the tree.  The pits are now littered across the swing set.

In other news, we have another groundhog.

Son of a #%*(^@#?!.  For real.  Those $&%#&*@$?!!s.

You want to know the really neat thing, though?  I recently turned down two adjunct teaching jobs because it’s increasingly clear that I need room to build my work.  And that’s amazing and freeing and terrifying and beautiful.  More on that later…but I’ll add here that I’ll be starting a support group for the people who are crazy enough to step off the beaten path and believe they can make their own way.  There may be drinking; there will certainly be chocolate.  Join us (online or in person) if you can.

Heard this morning, II

Len and Ezra in the kitchen, while Len does laundry and Ezra plays with his animal habitat sticker book (which may be the biggest bang for our buck toy-wise EVER):

Ezra: I like slithery snakes.

Len: I’m not a big fan of the slithery snakes.

Ezra: Are you a big fan of eels?

Len: Not a big fan of eels either.  Or slithery snakes.

Ezra: Are you a big fan of crabs?

Len: Sure.  I don’t mind crabs.

Ezra: Are you a big fan of lobsters?

Len: I like to eat lobsters.

Ezra: Are you a big fan of frogs?

Len: Sure.  I could get behind a good frog.

Ezra: Are you a big fan of orca whales?

Len: Well, they can be kind of mean.

Ezra: Are you a big fan of humpback whales?

Len: Yes!  I’ve actually seen humpback whales from a boat.

Ezra: I’ve seen humpback whales from a castle.

Len: Really?  Where was this?

Ezra: Down in Portland.  I saw humpback whales and orca whales and dolphins and crabs and lobsters and snakes and eels and frogs all from a castle down in Portland.

Which is truly awesome.  And makes me wish there WERE such a castle and that we could go there on this blizzardy day.