I remember Jason
coming home one time and saying, “I saw you driving by the park when I was on
my run.” I was probably, I thought to
myself with that self-consciousness that comes from finding out that you were
being watched when you hadn’t known it, singing
loudly and atrociously. “You looked like this,” he said, simulating a tense
race car driver, hands gripping the wheel at two and ten, head pressed forward
toward the windshield, shoulders tense. We laughed. I realized that is how I
drive all the time. Tensely, though I am not, overall, a nervous driver. Even
when I am on my way home to relax after a long day of work. I rush.
A few weekends ago,
I got miserably sick. I didn’t know it until the following Tuesday because my
mom was visiting and everything always feels all right when she’s around. Also,
it’s my first spring in Kansas and I can actually see the foreign pollens
floating around in the air and up my nose, so I figured I was likely just
fighting with Midwestern allergies. But on Tuesday, after Mom had left and I
had to face, be in charge of, and teach a hundred forty squirrely, needy adolescents,
I knew that I was miserably sick. The sick was entirely in my head (literally,
not figuratively), but also thoroughly entrenched there, giving no indication
that it ever planned to leave. I couldn’t inhale. I couldn’t exhale. I couldn’t
swallow or open my mouth without coughing. I wheezed. I slept sitting at a
ninety degree angle, on the floor, with my couch propping me up (so that I also
acquired severe muscle cramps.) My ears hurt and my head hurt and sound
traveled to my brain as though it were first traveling through a long and windy
tunnel. When I spoke, I was pretty sure sound came out, but it, too sounded
more like a gusty breeze than actual language. I wasn’t sure my ears would ever
be unplugged again. And somehow, without begin able to sleep, and without being
able to hear, I stopped rushing.
You know when you
go outside after the first snow, or maybe even when there’s still a little
dusting coming down, and the cloud cover is low and the birds are tucked away
and there’s this peaceful silence over the world that is both startling and
stunningly beautiful? Rest, it
whispers. Be warm and still, it says.
The world is waiting, it hums, you can wait too. Well, in a much less
beautiful, much more mucusey way, that is exactly what my head cold told me. I
stopped rushing because, like being stuck at home on a snow day, I couldn’t
rush. I had neither the energy nor the self-awareness that a fully breathing,
fully hearing human being has and so my pace just slowed to a state of social survival.
I was miserable, physically. But emotionally, I actually felt calm. My head,
though far from clear, cleared. I felt like I was better at my job because I
was only able to focus on one thing at a time instead of the mad multitasking
of my usual day. I had time to laugh even when I had forty papers to grade by
Friday. When I asked or answered questions, I didn’t race through them because
my tired brain needed an extra second to process. I paused to breath (through
my mouth). It was an awakening for me. I rush; but not (it seems) when that
oh-so-fragile blessing of health demands my humility.
Two Sundays ago, I
was stuck in the airports of the state of Texas for a total of twenty travel
hours in an effort to get back to Kansas City before work on Monday. As we
roamed around the airport in Houston, walking between gates, grabbing dinner,
finding places to charge our cell phones, getting cups of coffee, it struck me
how slowly I was willing and able to roam inside the airport. Sure, it was due,
in part, to the fact that I had a major case of boredom and a mild case of
airport depression, but after some thought, what I realized was most poignantly
missing was not the stress (lightning storms in Dallas are definitely
stressful), or the lack of a destination or job to get done (we had both), but
rather, my to-do lists. I didn’t have any, there, in the airport. My intention
had been to fly home that morning and make my to-dos for the rest of the day
and the new week. That had been part of the purpose, really, in leaving Texas
so early on Sunday, to have time to prepare ourselves for the upcoming week.
But there I was in Houston at about five hours past when I should have been
home and, obviously, I wouldn’t have time to make the lists, let alone to
accomplish anything on them that night. And not having an inkling about when I
would actually get home (along with that mild depression) left list-making in
the airport a futile and fruitless endeavor. I literally had nothing on my
plate besides listening for Dallas weather updates (which weren’t really
changing anyway) and the mediocre burger from Chili’s Too (yes, it’s actually
called that) in the airport rotunda. So I walked slower. I mean, it’s strange
to say, but that was really the most direct result of my being list-less. I
walked more slowly. (Suddenly, the word listless has taken on a whole new
meaning…or has it always been that way and I just never noticed?)
I rush; but not (apparently)
in the airport, where the state of affairs is so out of my control as to be
utterly immune to pre-planning. The length of the security line, the helpfulness
of the attendants, the weather in Dallas, all dramatically important to my trip
and entirely unpredictable, with or without my list making.
In “real life”
outside the confines of crazy weather patterns and crazier airline policies, I
am always planning ahead. Always. Minutes, hours, days, months. At five A.M.,
in the shower, I am deciding in what order to make lunch, do my makeup, and
feed the pig, trying to formulaically determine which will be the most
efficient. (I don’t even sing in the shower anymore, I find. I don’t have the
time.) When I am eating lunch, I am deciding what errands to run after school,
and how long they will take, and how much time that will leave me to do the
things that I need to do once I get home, and what those will be. Part of this
may have been nurtured by the teaching profession. Preempting student issues
can take up half of my in-class attention at any given time, at least. But also
I can remember being obsessive about organized planning since high school. I am
sure that this is, in some ways, a good quality. I have frequently witnessed
the struggles of people who can’t organize their time or plan ahead to save
their lives, and therein lies a different kind of stress and insanity and
failure. But what is happening to my mind when it is planning my upcoming time
to the tenth of a second? For one thing, it is missing the experience it is in
at the moment. This planning, which is meant to make the future, when it comes,
more manageable, is obscuring the present. So if it’s not, ultimately,
affecting the present positively, is it not self-defeating? Pointless?
This has been a
rough year. Everyone knows that I’m good at adventures, but bad at transitions.
I like to be spontaneous, but I like to make a list before I go. And I’ve been a
California gal for the past 28 years. Moving to Kansas has been exciting, but breathe
taking, sometimes like standing on the edge of a windy mountain at sunset, and
other times like a plain old asthma attack in the urgent care office at one in
the morning. I have to admit, as this school year comes to a close, that I’m a
little bit haggard, not just professionally, but also spiritually. And I am
thoroughly sick of rushing. If there’s one thing my head cold and Dallas have
taught me it’s that there’s something to be said for throwing urgency to the
wind and telling the uncontrollably spinning world that you’re just not going
to keep up all the time. It also taught me that slowing down is possible. After
all, if it happened twice in two weeks and the world didn’t implode, it seems
chances are that it could continue in a similar vein. As I’ve sat here,
pondering why this lesson is so hard for me to learn, I am reminded of dozens
of times that I have discovered this truth before, including:
- Have you ever seen a line of cars on a busy street, silently and patiently stopped? No red lights, no honking. Just brake lights. And you look up ahead and there goes a family of ducks, crossing the street with the faith of a mustard seed? The busy, flustered, late-for-work world stops short for the whole vulnerable lot of them. And most of them probably smile as their running-on-empty cars slow to a sudden stop.
- You know how really old people do everything slowly? And at first you think it’s because their bodies are tired and painful and arthritic and they just don’t have the energy they once had. But then you realize that it’s also because they just don’t give a damn. They talk slowly, they move slowly, they think slowly, they wait patiently, they observe, and it’s because they’ve learned that rushing life doesn’t make it any better or more lasting than taking your time in it.
- There was a quote written on the wall of the Starbuck’s in the Barnes and Noble at the Marina Pacifica in Long Beach. I wrote it down on a slip of napkin and I have carried it with me, on multiple pieces of paper, in notebooks, and in my mind ever since. It struck me like a blow when I first read it. I was already rushing by then. It said, “Speak softly; the world will listen. Take your time; the world will wait.”
- Ms. Gayer, my twelfth grade U.S. Government teacher had more poise than anyone I have ever met. In the face of unruly adolescent boys and our general ignorance about the country from which we came, she never lost her cool, her patience, or the slight smile on her face that belied any power we believed our rebelliousness might have over her authority. I have always wanted that kind of carriage.
- Southern drawls. Have you ever noticed that they still get everything said that they need to say?
And now the head
cold. And the lists. I’m writing fewer of them. My list-less, post Texas week
made me aware of another flaw in my methods. There are so many things to write
down and so many different types of lists that no amount of cataloguing,
electronically or on paper, seems to organize them adequately anyway. Perhaps
that is what adulthood is, having too much to do to even make lists about. It’s
irritating to forget things, which I sometimes do, now that everything is not
written down minute by minute. But it’s not as irritating – or disheartening –
as losing a list because I can’t remember which organizational device I have
stored it in, or spending hours writing the list and then finding that I cannot
possibly do all of it when I’m supposed to, or, even more stressful, finding
that the list is so complex that it actually needs to be divided down into
multiple little list babies. It is not as irritating as finding myself overwhelmed
and exhausted at the end of the day and knowing that I have not crossed off
enough items, that the triage needs have changed, and that I’m going to do the
same. damn. thing. tomorrow. It seems, at the end of the day, that I have
finally become bored with rushing.
And while it seems I am willing to allow myself to be miserable, I adamantly
draw the line at boredom. It’s so nothing. Now my list is short and immediate
and everything else has to just fly around, willy nilly, hoping to either smack
me upside the head and grab my attention, or waiting until it, too, is short
and immediate and makes the list cut. My life is a disorganized, chaotic, mess.
And yet, I feel, myself, like the eye of the storm. Here are the results so
far:
- I spend less money (mainly because I forget to buy all the things I need when I go the store, but also because forgetting has shown me that I need fewer things than I actually think I do. And because I try to do fewer things [and go fewer places] within a day.)
- I wake up with a clearer head. In the shower, when all the thoughts come rushing back. I ignore them by instead asking myself these two questions: “What will I do to make today exciting and new? How will I avoid boring myself to death?” It’s a more interesting question to mull over than whether I should put my grocery list in my phone or in my planner.
- I use more coupons (this sort of goes back to my first point). I used to find the lists quite unruly enough to have the energy to also organize and carry along coupons. Now, they’re just tucked neatly in an envelope in my glove box, ready to grab wherever I go. They also sometimes (ironically and delightfully) remind me what I am supposed to buy.
- I spend my time actually doing things instead of thinking about doing things.
- Those most obnoxious and distasteful and emergent tasks that always seem to pop up and harangue the edges of your mind, those items which I used to write down on a long list in order to put them off as long as possible, but then worry over incessantly, those things, I just take care of them now. Because I’m afraid to forget them and realize that they take so much longer to do when I wait until the problem is complicated.
- I notice people more. Their emotions, their conversations, their needs. And because I notice more, I take the time to connect more.
- I pray more.
- My house is messier. But it stresses me out less.
- I feel less like a middle school nerd bomber. It’s probably superficial and ridiculous to even bring it up, but I have always been a small person with a big load. I am a collector, a reader, a writer, and a resource hoarder, so I have always bogged myself down like a pack mule in daily life. With my wide load and my short, sharp, quick steps, I have never stopped feeling like that undersized kid at school who everyone either feels sorry for or mocks. But it’s amazing how much a slower stride can make my wide load more manageable, give me a sense of competence and power, allow me an awareness of my posture and my intentions.
Random factoid about
Keith Urban from the days when I used to like to watch him rock the electric
guitar singing “These are the days we will remember”: He has a tattoo on his
arm that says, “Life is a balance between holding on and letting go.” My
interest in Keith Urban’s music has waned, but my appreciation for that tattoo
has not. I have, I am coming to believe, in my adult life, held on too tightly
to illusions of what it means to be fulfilled and successful. Have held on too
tightly to things that are true in high school, but not in its aftermath, to a
personal strictness and self-discipline that, though it has served me, has also
at times inhibited my growth as a person. It is time to let some things go. I
have also, it seems, let go of some things, inadvertently, that are dearly
important to me, in exchange for succumbing to the demands of the world in
which I live. Lost them like change out of a hole in my pocket, noticing them
gone only later when they are much harder to track down, but when I need them
the most. I want to hold those things again. In my hand. See that they can
truly be tangible, even in this world, like Ethan Hawley’s glowing stone in
Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent.
The fact of the matter is that my scale needs rebalancing in the holding on and
letting go department. And it starts with slowing down a little, both in action
and in thought. So I can at least think and observe again. I would like to live
without continuing to make the exhausting and futile mistake of trying to do
too much in a day and the other related and truly tragic mistake of failing to
do enough in a lifetime. To rush it all away.
-R.E.A.
No comments:
Post a Comment