Notes from Maine -
When I have company visiting, my routine changes quite a bit. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. Instead of putting on my headphones and losing myself in projects, I spend a lot more time hanging around the kitchen (the heart of this house) and socializing. It makes sense. I don’t have company all that often—I wouldn’t want to ignore them.
My mother is coming up next weekend for my niece’s graduation. You can ignore that opening paragraph with regards to my mother’s visits. When Mom is here, I work on projects twice as much, just to get things done so she can work on the projects that she wants to do.
Anyway, the reason I bring it up…
I was pondering recently and I questioned whether or not my life would change significantly in the next ten years. Growing up, once my parents got divorced and my father got a separate house, I formed very strong opinions about how he lived his life. He worked very hard (lawyer for a lobbying organization) and then came home to sit. He would sit, drink, smoke, and sometimes watch TV. That was his routine every night until it was time to go to bed. Weekends he had a series of errands that he ran (dry cleaners, shopping, etc.), small chores to do, and when those were done he would sit, drink, smoke, and sometimes watch TV.
It would drive me crazy if I was so engrossed in a job that it took every ounce of my energy.
But maybe that wasn’t really the way he was living his life. It’s possible that he only lived that way because I was there. Maybe, like me, he substantially changed his pattern when he had “company” in the house. I didn’t consider myself “company,” but I can imagine that he might have thought it rude to go off and do a project while I just sat there. It would have been fine. It’s not like I was begging to sit around doing nothing, watching him sit, drink, smoke, and sometimes watch TV.
Honestly, I don’t think that I misjudged him at all. I think I really was seeing the real way he chose to live his life.
With Mom, she wants to be completely engaged in doing something right until the moment that her head hits the pillow. She doesn’t kill time. With Dad, every day has a finish line. He’s just trying to get to five o’clock so he can cross the line into “leisure time.” His parents were exactly the same way. Each day there might as well have been a buzzer at 5pm where they would put everything down and switch over to doing nothing for the rest of the night. I mean, not nothing, but nothing of consequence. There was dinner and cleanup. Sometimes they would read and sometimes watch TV (drinking and smoking, of course).
My grandmother visited my house a couple of times before she died. I gave her the tour and showed her all the things I was doing.
She asked, “Yes, but when do you get to enjoy it?”
I was enjoying it. I was enjoying almost every second of it.
So, I’m living my life the way I want to, right?
Why bother spending any time at all wondering why other people like to live their lives in a different way?
The issue for me is that I find myself nostalgic for those empty moments when nothing is happening. Sitting completely unoccupied is almost like a form of meditation. The mind has a chance to consider and release preoccupation. Calm reflection is a good way to stay grounded and centered. With podcasts in my ears and projects lined up until it’s time for bed, I rarely sit in silence and consider the day. Even when I’m exercising, I’m listening to something or watching something. I guess writing is the closest I come to deep reflection.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a book where young people threw away technology and tried to return to a simpler lifestyle. We grow up being silently indoctrinated into thousands of years of written and unwritten rules that we accept. Some of them make no sense at all. I think it would be fascinating to take a step back and consider everything with a fresh perspective.
Since that will never happen, I decided to write a book where it does.
