My Own Personal Nirvana

I have a secret time of the week that is all my own.  No one can touch it.  No one can invade it.  It is impossible to ruin. It is the very best part of the weeked for me.  It is my own personal holiday in a busy life. This is the time right after I’ve dropped my bags by the door, kicked off the work shoes, hugged and kissed the little one and said “Good-bye, have fun and be safe!” to her for the every other weekend that she goes to be with her dad.  It is the time right before I head out for evening festivities to blow off steam from a stressful week with other adults who’ve also had a stressful week and need some adult time as well.  I might not even go out.  I might stay in and simply revel in the silence (except for the stereo, always the stereo!) and enjoy the blissful solitude of not having to answer to anyone, of not having to be completely cheery,animated and confident when I really feel exhausted,  frazzled, uncertain and unprepared.  I don’t have to try to carry a conversation, diagnose a learning problem or strategize or organize anything. I don’t have the constant buzz of young voices in the background. I don’t have to be “on”.  I don’t have to be anything.  It is that time of the week that I do not have to do anything I do not want to do.  I don’t have to show up…or I can.  It is my choice. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of choice lately.  We all want it. In the U.S., it is an inalienable right. Some enjoy it more than others.  We have it and yet we don’t.  We make choices and those choices completely remove certain other choices from our plate of options.  Sometimes we make choices and the results of those choices take us down roads where we end up completely without any options whatsoever.  Being without options is not necessarily a bad thing either, but mostly, being without options in many cases and for many people translates as “trapped”, “caught”, “stuck”.  It can happen when choosing living arrangements, universities or vocational schools, relational partners, careers or geographical areas to settle in.  The tough thing about choice is that you can’t always tell whether the choice you make today will end you up in your own personal prison years down the road.

One thing I’ve noticed about myself  lately, and by lately I mean over the last couple of years, not just the last few weeks, is that more and more I want to create my own hoops to jump through.  I’m less inclined to want to jump through someone else’s hoops.  For example, when considering whether or not to return to grad school for that prized doctorate, I decided that I really just don’t want to go back to school (at least right now) in order to jump through someone else’s hoops to get a piece of paper that says I can now put a few additional letters behind my name. The degree wouldn’t necessarily give me many more options than I have now and it might even be one of those choices that lands me in the place where I feel very “trapped”, “caught”, “stuck”.  I decided to wait on the PhD. 

On the other hand, I enjoy jumping through certain hoops. My job for example is one area where I will jump through hoops.  I do this because I like the reward of the paycheck every month for doing so and I also like this because right now the idea of jumping through my own hoops in a self-employed sort of way presents far too much choice for me and far too much instability.  Choice, in that way, is not desirable to me.

Being trapped or caught or stuck by our choices can be an incredibly rewarding experience as in the context of relationship, for example.  Consider that rare relationship where you and your partner fit so amazingly well together in more ways than just the physical.  There is the right amount of closeness, intimacy and connection perfectly balanced with the exact amount of respect for each others’ differences and individual preferences and need for solitude or separateness. You can see doing life with this person and it is an exciting vision not an  uncertain venture.  In this case, the choice made leads to being limited in ways that are fulfilling and rewarding. The reality is, you are in a place that you are, to some degree, very limited in the range of certain kinds of choices you can make while certain other options have been completely eliminated.  Being without options in this scenario is not necessarily a bad thing.

Choice.  How to spend our money.  How to spend our time.  How to spend our lives.  Choice. 

Freedom.  Freedom from having to make choices.  Freedom to make choices.  Freedom to freefall.  Those are Friday afternoons for me.

Friday afternoon: those moments after the breakneck speed of a whirlwind week and right before the weekend is officially underway.  The entire weekend stretches before me filled with free choice and choosing my own hoops to jump through in the order in which I choose to jump them.  No schedules to keep except those I implement.  No obligations to fulfill except ones I’ve chosen.  On Friday afternoon the weekend looms large and I don’t have to commit to any of it just yet. 

Choice and freedom.

To do…or not…as I choose.

This is my own personal Nirvana.

The What If Game

My life these days is incredibly drama free and peaceful.  Well, for the most part it is.  There’s the occasional tense moment that occurs when living with other people in an arrangement designated by most as family, but compared to the past two decades, my life is exceptionally drama free.  In fact, compared to most people, my life is exceptionally drama free. 

This doesn’t mean my life is boring.  Nor is it lackluster. 

Life with me is always very animated, that’s for sure. 

Life with me has a certain bit of comedy and theatrics to it, I’ll warrant, but drama?  Hmmm, not so much. 

 Here’s a typical day in my life these days:

After awakening and the deplorable hour of 9:00 a.m., I head back into the house after picking up the morning paper from the walk and turning on the sprinkler. I flop down on my large overstuffed and very comfy couch to browse through the meaningless empty print that constitutes the local paper. Later, I will spend an hour playing around on Facebook, looking up old tunes and listening to them on Youtube and doing whatever it is I want or nothing at all. It is an amazingly charmed life I live these days. On these days in particular, the ones where the kids are all gone at the other parents’ home and I have no deadlines or obligations except to take care of just me, it is not unlike being retired.  I do what I want when I want.  After running around crazy all school year long and being at the beck and call of four children with active academic and social lives and none of them driving, it is nice to just be able to do nothing at all. It is a luxury most single mothers don’t get.  I am very aware of this and incredibly grateful.  While most single parents (except for the exceptionally wealthy ones) have to get up every day, even during the summer, and rush off to a job only to come home and do the second shift then later fall exhausted into bed only to start the entire exercise wheel process over again, I do not have to do this for nearly 3 months of every year. It’s true I pay for it during the school year when I have no life, but it is worth it because on days like today, life is anything but pressured, harried, exhausting or stressed. 

 Of course, I could and have been caught up in that desire for the crazy lifestyle that rewards one with a penthouse view and status and money in the bank.  I was there many years ago, working in the San Francisco Bay area and commuting into my entry level management position with lots of promotional potential and making big money to cover the relatively low overhead I had at the time. Had I continued down that track, I am certain I would be enjoying a very different life than I am now.  I’d be living in a very different setting, doing very different things with very different people.  Part of me, at times wonders, how might my life have been different?

 Do you ever do this? Wondering how your life might be different if…if?  I call it “The What If Game”.  I suspect everyone spends time on this game show at one time or another. 

If I’d kept that job in the Bay Area instead of staying married and returning to Oregon.

 If I’d gone into journalism instead of teaching. 

 If I’d studied law instead of going to work.

 If I’d stayed single longer.

 If I’d married that boy instead of breaking it off.

If I’d…if I’d…if I’d….

The choice made, a job offer accepted or refused, an apartment rented instead of a home purchased, a family delayed or started unexpectedly or not at all, a relationship passed on, another fully explored and furthered. A vice casually stumbled upon which grips you insidiously till you realize one day it has you beyond your control.  A thought, a glance, a brief and casual encounter….the cumulative effect of the smallest insignificant encounters, like grains of sand on the beach, become strong enough and monumental enough to create a lifetime.  One little tweak in the design and the picture can be drastically altered.

 Choices.  Decisions.  Cause and effect.  Outcomes.  Paths not taken or taken that we can never retrace in order to change directions.  Nope.  Unlike getting lost on a road and simply turning the car around and going back in the direction from whence we came, life doesn’t allow u-turns.  Even if it did, the passage of time, our own maturing and that of others, the births and deaths of those we love, all these events change the path and the scenery along the way.

This is as it should be.  Even if it is not as it should be it is how it is.

When I go down the mental “I wonder” path, I never do this with regret.  I can’t regret.  I’ve learned too much and grown too much down the road I did travel to worry about it. I do it with curious interest and speculation. Yes, my life, had I made different choices at each juncture, would be very, very different.  But would it be better?  Worse?  Who knows?  I don’t care.  What I find important at this point is that I take less and less for granted these days. I’m glad for the paths I’ve traveled, the lessons I’ve learned, the ones I’m trying to master even now and the person I’ve become as the result.  I am so very content in many ways.

While I don’t sit around and dwell over the consequences of every little action, decision or behavior, I do enjoy contemplating the idea that you never know what path you might be heading down next.  Even when you think you know the path, even when you think you are choosing a particular direction to head, what the journey looks like and where you end up can be very, very different than you imagined.  It’s fun to just enjoy the journey rather than stressing out about when, where and how I’m going to get to the blasted destination. Of course, I don’t always feel this peaceful and un-rushed about it all. There are deadlines that loom and more tasks to accomplish than time to accomplish them most of the time, of course.  I know this.  

On summer days like these, though, it just really easy to appreciate the fact that life really is a series of journeys instead of a destination you head for.  With the stress of the daily routine temporarily at bay, it is fun to sit back and speculate about the road behind, the current road and the path(s) ahead.  I do this with just a mild amount of interest and anticipation.  It will be fun to look back a year from now and see how different things look from how they currently appear. 

 Until then, The What If Game holds no interest to me, because I’m too busy playing The What Next Game.  Where are you today?  Are you playing the What If Game and wishing you’d made different choices or are you grateful for the journey you’ve been on and are you looking forward to what’s around the corner?

Love at Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving morning, 2008.  It’s a foggy, misty morning.  I’m writing early because I might not have time later today, and I might not be inspired. I was planning to write some creative thing about being thankful in reverse…or “Things I’m Thankful I Don’t Have”, but being one of those undiagnosed ADD types, I went wandering around Wordpress instead. In my wanderings, I bumped into a couple of blog posts this morning that I thought were very good.  I thought I’d share them.  I always like it when people tell others about something that I’ve written that they found value in, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to return the favor.

The first is a new blog to me.  She writes about love, a huge, unfathomable topic and she barely scratches the surface as you can expect.  She does make some great thought-provoking points and I like the way she writes.  She also gave me much to think about and possibly blog for myself on the topic.  Her post’s title was fairly creative and I love creative.  You can read this blog post, “Love Shouldn’t Feel Like Getting Run Over By a Train” here. Now that I go back and reread the post, I notice that this particular article was written way back in 2006.  I need to get better at noticing things like that.  Even so, I liked it.  Maybe her comments will spark your thinking about the topic of love and family and your kids, if you have them.  I wonder if she’s still writing or if she’s abandoned her blog?  Hmmmm.  Whatever the case may be with her, I do agree with her title.  Been there. Done that. Bought the t-shirt.  Wore it out.  That’s why I clicked on her link.

The next post is more recently written by someone who is still writing.  His post’s topic is about doing the things you love and making money (or not) at them.  I’m pointing you to Jim’s blog, because he really is a fabulous writer.  Check out his complete post titled, The Money Will Follow (or Not), here. He also made me think…especially about this writing thing and making money at it.  His points reminded me of one of the reasons, beyond complete fear of rejection, that I haven’t yet published:  if I do what I love for a living, which in this case is writing, am I a.) good enough to make money at it? b.) is there a market for my kind of writing (and I don’t even really know for sure what that is yet, thus this blog) and c.) will it become a duty under deadlines instead of a creative outlet and intellectual passion?  (Jim didn’t so much mention that last point in his blog but the first two points were his.  They made me think of the last one.)

Anyway.  With all the talk about love this almost sounds like it could pass for a Valentine’s Day post.

I hope whatever you are doing today, that it is filled with peace, gratitude, good food, good company and some relaxation.  Anyone out there playing mud football today?