This is the post that I was writing on Monday that I stopped. I mulled over whether or not to continue it or just post it . . . so, just posting it.
“We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.” ~ Teju Cole, from Open City
Monday afternoon, sunny and mild, 71 degrees.
It’s an absolutely beautiful day today after two days of rain over the weekend. Truthfully, though, the whole concept of weekend has changed so much in my life. No longer is weekend the only time in which I can do things around the house, or catch up on laundry, or run errands, or all of those other ways in which I used to fill those two days. Gone is the need to rush to accomplish everything by Sunday evening in order to get some rest before beginning the work week once more.
And truthfully, I kind of miss that structure. Even though it’s been more than 11 years since I left my full-time job, my career, whatever you want to call it, I still miss work. I miss having deadlines, having places to go, even doing mundane paperwork. I don’t miss my last group of coworkers as they were undoubtedly the most dysfunctional group of people I have ever encountered in an office: one was uber passive aggressive, another was a smile-in-your-face-stab-you-in-the-back master, and the person with whom I worked most closely was a full-blown sociopath.
Hindsight. It’s such a clarifier.
But I never saw that job as the end of my working career. I still had goals, still wanted to accomplish more things, explore more avenues, but that all ceased to be possible in the spate of one week. Even now, all of these years later, I still think about what jobs I’d like to do, what degrees I’d like to earn. It’s hard to let go of it all.
“I can’t explain the goings,
or the comings. You enter suddenly,
and I am nowhere again.
Inside the majesty.” ~ Jalal al-Din Rumi
One of the worst decisions I ever made was to have that major back surgery in 2007. Essentially, it wrecked my body and began my long road down a path of chronic, unremitting pain. Had i waited even five years, I’m convinced the surgery and recovery would have been simpler, and my results might have been better.
I know that it’s more than a cliche to say that when you’re young you approach life as if you are infallible, but it’s so true for me. As a teenager I taxed my body as a cheerleader; when I was married the first time, I ended up lifting and carrying more weight than I should have, mostly because my marriage was such a game of one-ups-manship: I would ask my spouse to take care of something; he would ignore it; I would do it to spite him, never realizing that I was only hurting myself. When I taught, I carried around huge stacks of books and papers all of the time. Then when I worked as a retail manager, I used to routinely move fully-loaded fixtures around the floor. In my mind, it took too much time to unload the clothes, so why bother.
Of course, I was very physically fit at the time. It never occurred to me that I might suffer the consequences somewhere down the line, so of course, I did.
Youth and stupidity go hand in hand in oh so many ways.
“I saw the first light, fore-running the sun, gather in a cup of the eastern cloud, gather and grow and brim, till at last it spilled like milk over the golden lip, to smear the dark face of heaven from end to end . . . the clouds slackened, the stars, trembling on the verge of extinction, guttered in the dawn wind, and the gates of day were ready to open at the trumpet . . .” ~ Mary Stewart, from Madam, Will You Talk?
Ever since Dallas took Napoleon, Sassy has become incorrigible. Each day, she comes onto the front porch and stamps her hooves, demanding to have food. I tell Corey that he doesn’t understand that she’s pregnant, so she’s hungry all of the time. In his mind, there’s a pasture filled with fresh grass just ready to be grazed, so why isn’t she cooperating with that? I don’t know if horses get funny food cravings when they are pregnant, but wouldn’t it funny if they did? What if she’s craving sunflowers? Or Kentucky Fescue?
I remember that with each pregnancy, I had different cravings: first it was hot fudge sundaes from McDonald’s and olives, but not together; second was soft pretzels (I think); third was Mexican food, and fourth was mustard.
But as I try to type this, Sassy is on the porch stamping, which causes Maddy to bark like crazy. It’s very distracting, but then, pretty much everything out here is distracting: the small spider crawling up the side of my screen, all of the different bird songs, including the hawk that just flew over, the podcast that I have running in the background, the way all of the pups suddenly decide to chase the goats, just out of the blue.
That’s another thing that’s changed with me: I used to be able to concentrate so fully on a task that I would forget to go to the bathroom. Single-minded was a good description. Now, scattershot comes to mind.
More later. Peace.
Music by Iron & Wine, “Muddy Hymnal”
Lola's Curmudgeonly Musings 