I have a to do list and a deadline. The deadline is September 13, when the new school year begins. The to do list is all the things we have to do, in order to be ready and able to welcome the new students. Anxiety around all of this...new students, new school year, enough students, enough money, enough time, enough skill, enough paper, enough clothing, enough tents...oh, and those last three...not on my to do list, however i'm more than available to absorb the anxiety from the lists running alongside mine.
Anxiety, and I will use Steve's term, is oh so NHI.
Now the picture, for all of the above, improves daily. The to do list gets whittled away , and the students sign up. But not at my pace. Not fast enough. Not good enough. Not enough enough.
Yesterday, was herb harvesting day for me. A line on my to do list. Harvest herbs.
What is the point of that? You must be kidding? In the grand scheme of things, with all that is to be done, and all that is still unknown, I should harvest herbs? Not likely. I should really walk around with my brain ponderously jitterbugging, throwing my hands up in frustrated despair, perhaps cussing. I should conceive of Plan B, and Plan C, and Plan D. I should immediately begin work on Plan B, and then abandon it to begin work on Plan C which I will toss to the side to commence Plan D. Then, with the to do list undone, and three alternate plans incomplete, I should erupt and then collapse. A better use of my time for sure.
Instead, I forced myself to harvest mint, lemon balm, dill, and coriander.
The sun was hot and the bugs plentiful in the herb garden. Flies buzzed and tiny gnats whizzed in and out of my ears. The mint and lemon balm was a tangled jungle of snaking vines, frustrating any attempt to cut in an orderly fashion. I snipped away at whatever came before me, taking this and that and accumulating little in my buckets. I began to seethe at how many hours this was going to take. How much wasted time. How little I had to show for all of my sweaty distracted work. And the flies buzzed and the gnats whizzed and the vines remained tangled.
By accident, standing on the edge of the timber that borders the herb garden, I dislodged it. It fell away from the tangle of vines, and as I bent to replace it I saw, nestled against the dirt, a thick wooden vine, from which sprouted, probably 20 additional vines. With my clippers I cut at the base, and pulled, and a huge tree of mint came away.
Now in view, sprouting directly from the earth, were more and more of these thick vines. Pushing my face forward into the shady jungle floor I began to clip. One, two, three, four. And the jungle in that spot was cleared. From that perspective I could easily see where the mint and lemon balm separated. I clipped away at the mint filling bucket after bucket. Then I started on the lemon balm. More buckets. More clearing. In almost no time at all, that section of the bed was cleared, and I had hauled three or four five gallon buckets of mint and four or five buckets of lemon balm to the kitchen.
I used the same technique of on the towering, exploding dill and cilantro. That took less time.
The sun moved east, and cooling shadows crept in from the surrounding woods. I was upstairs in the school, removing thousands of dill seeds from the spindly stalks I had collected earlier. Frustration returned.
As seeds scattered about, and barely an inch developed in my bag, I again thought to myself. What is the damn point of this? I will be doing this until midnight, and I still have the coriander. Plus I have to tie up and hang all the mint and lemon balm. I'll just do this tomorrow.
But I didn't want to carry it over until tomorrow. Tomorrow has its own lines on the list.
Then I picked up my mail, and I had netflix. I've Loved You for So Long and The Wrestler. Haven't seen either. So I lit a kerosene lamp and pulled the school TV out of the closet, and watched movies in the dark, and plucked seeds. Then I buried my arms to the elbows in cool damp fragrant mint and lemon balm and hung them to dry. And the day ended. And I scratched something off my to do list. And the school will have lots and lots of tea, and we can make dilled sourdough and serve it with a spicy stew seasoned with coriander. And I watched two amazing performances. And today's list is waiting, so rather than get out my hammer and nail down what all this means, I'll move on. Suffice to say, I learned what I needed to learn.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
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Man oh man. Quite a slice of life there. Somehow, it made me more happy to read your entry, than to find no entry at all. So thanks for that, Dan.
ReplyDeleteMay boss gives me his leftover Funny Times Newspaper every month. One of the comics this time was a single frame showing a view of an apartment with a guy playing at an upright piano, a desk light over the sheet music, a couch, a table, a cat, a pencil, a piece of paper, a glass of water, a window. Then there were descriptions and arrows pointing to each item saying what each wished they were: a grand piano, Mozart, a martini, a novel, a fountain pen, a French provincial coffee table, a down-filled couch, a cougar instead of the cat, a sunset, the ocean instead of a plain concrete-looking walkway. The caption underneath read, "What They Wished They Were".
Maybe that fits with where you mentioned "enough" in your entry above. Everything's hankering at being more, better, different than they are. And much effort is justified in the pursuit of these, toward happiness, as though happiness is a future contingency based on performance, and not just right wherever one is. The convincing treadmill of pursuit with all its looming uncertainties and time constraints and pressures and partial wishes to be free of it all, even while pressing on.
Erma Bombeck said, "A mother can expect to accomplish a lot so long as she doesn't have to be appreciated for it." I think this has to do with most everyone, doesn't it? We do, we pursue, we effort, we accomplish with determination and persistence. Much gets done. Everyone's getting all kinds of things done under the radar of others ever being able to grok how much has been accomplished.
So much has already been set up for us to function in. The marble walls at the bank. The elevator at the apartment. The cell phone networks. Secret thinkers and invisible makers, all laying the groundwork for so many others to move around more capably in -- so many others they may never meet who can't possibly ever thank them.
And yet, we can only do as much as we can do, can only hold as much as we can carry. If I asked if you could do me a favor and you said, "Sure", and really meant it and really wanted to help me out; and I asked you to lift a piano for me with your bare hands, well, even if you really really wanted to lift it for me, you probably wouldn't be able to lift it bare handed. You'd have to decline satisfying my request no matter how much you would have liked to please me.
So, I think the pursuit of happiness has something to do with living within some reasonable limits, not going so overboard that desire to serve becomes resentment, revenge, burn out, abandonment. And I think we have to be careful, because some people will continue to ask you for more than you can possibly do, and so long as you keep attempting it, they'll keep enjoying your efforts with little sense of how much to appreciate you for it.
I'm glad you found some balance there, Dan. You pushed through, but you weren't pushed to the wall in the process. Good happened. Wonder happened. Relief happened. Completion happened. Good movies came to break up the monopoly of effort.
And the reading of the writing of it was very pleasing for me to read.
I appreciate you making the effort, setting up this site, giving me good invitation to contemplate happiness.
--Steve