I just felt the first wave of panic that this time is going to end before I want it to.
Then I felt a similar emotion while on a ski trip: the realization that the ski trip was going to end soon.
I realized it was the same emotion, just happening on different timelines.
And I hate the emotion, because it’s actually not rooted in reality. It’s just a feeling. What’s true is that I can extend my sabbatical. What’s also true is that I can extend my ski trip. There are simply reasons that I’m not.
(Ok, perhaps it’s a bit strong to say that I hate the emotion. The emotion simply is. I decide what to do with it. Hating it doesn’t make it go away, if anything it probably makes it come more frequently.)
With this perspective, it’s much easier to enjoy it, to savor it, because I’m making a willful choice to end it.
I think this is what makes death so challenging, because it’s totally beyond our control. Our brains don’t accept that it’s an inevitability.
But was it always so? What was that inflection point where we went from non-creative beast with no sense of mortality to pathetic human who ignores or escapes death at every turn? When did we first realize we could envision being outside ourselves and distinguish between knowledge and knowing of knowledge?
But enough of these philosophical musings.
Yesterday was a wonderful day. Yesterday was a mundane day. My wife has developed a serious infection of the green thumb, which has resulted in our world overflowing with plants (at least, relative to previous incarnations of our world). She wanted some companion succulents to complement her newly-purchased snake plant, as well as a companion shopper (me) at the garden shop. Though we had a clearly defined mission at the garden shop, we had no time constraints. We were free to take as long as we needed. We browsed. We marveled at the variability of the world of succulents, knowing full well we had a mere sliver of the actual succulent world in this southeastern US city garden shop. I found the most deformed looking plant of the lot, imagining how its irregularities would delight us.
But that wasn’t the end of the day. After the shop, we wandered some more. We discovered that a horribly overpriced café we once visited years ago had been replaced by a trendy new Indian restaurant. We aggravated a road construction worker by ignoring a handheld sign. We stumbled into a new Boba Tea place that served tea in the weirdest container I’ve ever seen, a mix of a baby bottle and a giant pill capsule. We found a new wine shop that was obsessed with décor and branding, but actually had quite a few nice bottles of wine (we were, after all, in a posher area of Raleigh, where such a wine shop will likely thrive). And we strolled.
On the surface, it sounds like we were being good little consumers and nothing more. And sure, buying stuff was technically what we did. But I’m far more interested in the way that we did it. We dawdled. We joked. We strolled. We didn’t act with a sense of urgency; we almost didn’t act at all. We just were. It was sublime.
There was a time a few months ago when I would have said something like, “I want every day to be like this,” and I would have identified every impediment to that happening and started to systematically remove those impediments, with the assumption that I could actually accomplish that goal and feel just bliss. It’s like there’s a bliss-o-meter on a dashboard somewhere and I could move the needle to the MOAR BLISS side and it would stay there.
But of course, that’s utter nonsense. If there even were such a bliss-o-meter, the only possible way it could ever function was constantly moving back and forth between MOAR DISTRESS and MOAR BLISS. If it ever were pointing at a particular location on that range for any extended period of time, it would be a sure sign that it was broken.
Oh wait, didn’t I say, “Enough of these philosophical musings”?
Well, too bad, because that’s where I’ve been for the most part for the past few months. In the absence of the urgency of capitalism, I’m free to ponder the deeper questions of meaning, existence, life, whatever. And oh, how I’ve been pondering. Apparently, though, I’m not alone. I met someone in the sauna the other day who told me he had cracked the code. He knew the secret.
Good for him. I never asked him what it was. Why ruin the adventure? I still have 6 months left…