We’ve reached the time of year where we can open the windows to let the cool fresh morning in. We’ll need to close up mid-day when we start sweating; the air conditioner feels glorious when that happens. For now, I hear the whir of grasshoppers, the caw of crows, and the chirp of songbirds.
When I walked out of my bedroom this morning, my heart did a little dance to see both of our children’s doors closed. For four years now, our son’s door has stood open while he’s been away at college. For two, our daughter’s has. Their closed doors mean they are both here, sleeping the summer sleep of not-yet-adults, my children.
Our son graduated from college last weekend. He now has some wayfinding to do. He double majored in English and computer science. All along, he expected he would pursue a career in computer science for practicality. The English degree was for his heart. As the semesters went by, we saw his literature classes light him up. We saw pride when he talked about the papers he wrote.
When graduation weekend approached, he really wanted us there for his English ceremony, where he’d get to walk the stage with the English department and shake hands with the professors he loved and that helped him find and appreciate great literature. We were there for it, in the outdoor amphitheater surrounded by white columned buildings.
I expected our son to have some wayfinding to do after graduation. I did not expect his graduation exercises to affect me as deeply as they did. The English ceremony knocked me off kilter. I cried during the main speech, given by an exceptional speaker, probably a Shakespearean actor, who quoted passages and referenced authors I love. My heart swelled for our son because I knew these were his people. I thought, these are my people, too. And it shook me up, because that is not the path I chose.
This week I’ve been thinking a lot about what moves me, about why we’re here, about what I’m doing with my life. I’m trying not to have regrets. I don’t want a different outcome for my life. If I’d made different choices, I wouldn’t have the people in my life who I love: my husband, my kids, my post-college friends. I do regret not paying attention to my own loves, to what lit me up, and pursuing more of that so that I could have that experience. I loved my literature classes. I loved reading and learning and digging into the meaning of texts with other people. At our son’s graduation, as the English department speakers talked about what the graduates learned in their studies, I longed for that for myself. I came home and looked into graduate school. What would it take to get a masters in English? Do I have it in me?
As a 51 year-old woman, I find myself doing my own wayfinding right now.
I woke this morning thinking, I want to blog today. I’ve been quiet the past week after graduation, not really ready to talk about my unsettled feeling, my deep seeking. Now I’m ready. When I saw today’s blog prompt — What is the meaning of life? — I had to laugh. I guess the universe is ready too.
I’ve been tracking my activities the past couple of weeks to pay attention to what engages me, what energizes me, and what drains me. This has been especially poignant after the graduation exercises last weekend. The English ceremony made me reckon with my struggle to understand myself and be true to what lights me up.
Today I seeded a mind map with one of the things from my activity tracking that both energizes and engages me — communication — and did a bunch of free-word association from there. A few things popped up multiple times in this and another similar exercise I did yesterday: books, stories, art, beauty, humans, laughter, understanding. Peace. Connection. I guess these are the meaning of life to me. These are my way.
Do you ever read something, or see a piece of art, and feel so deeply affected, that you think, “I want to write! I want to make art!”? This happens to me all the time, every day. I want to spend as much of my life as possible feeling the way I feel when I am moved by art, and so the natural progression is that I should make art myself.
The problem — or, one of the several problems — is that I’m not an artist. I will never be a writer like the writers I admire; I don’t have grand ideas for fictions or essays, nor the patience develop them. I blog and I journal for the pleasure of the act of writing, and that is enough. I have accepted this. I will not be a Donna Tartt or a Zadie Smith or any of the masters of language and storytelling I so admire, and that is okay. To enjoy anything for the act of doing it rather than for the product it creates is a gift.
But I do want to create. I crave it. Over the past few weeks I’ve been edging towards drawing again. There’s more daylight now. I could do it at the end of my workday to unwind. Yet I haven’t. At the end of the day, I want quiet: a quiet brain. At the end of the day, I often feel the most I can do is to stand at the window and look out, or to pick up the deck of cards and play a couple of rounds of solitaire.
It seems it would also be easy to draw, if only I could remember to. I don’t have to be good. Maybe that’s what’s stopping me — it feels like I need energy to draw because it will take effort to be decent at it and not get frustrated.
When I was in Halifax last week for a work meetup, we went to an art museum together. I was struck by the joy in one of the artist’s works, Maud Lewis. When I looked at her paintings, the overwhelming feeling I felt was merriment. This woman felt free when she made this. She had fun with paint. I want to relax and be free and just have fun with pens and pencils and maybe one day paint.
I met with my coach last week and shared, “I’m thinking about work too much. It keeps me up at night. I’ve started using my morning Me time to log in early and take care of stuff that’s on my mind so I can get it off my plate.”
One reason for doing this — for logging in early and thinking about work all the time — is that I’m engaged with what I’m doing, which is a good thing. I’m learning exciting things. I’m having fun with the people I work with. And I am really proud of what the teams I’m on are doing.
But more work begets more work, and by logging on early or logging off late, I create a vicious frenetic cycle of having to keep up with the extra work I’ve generated for myself by doing so. I make mistakes. My brain tires. Meanwhile, I don’t journal. I don’t blog. I don’t draw or look out the window at birds. My sleep suffers.
I told my coach about all of this. I told her that in order to do good work and not feel resentful of neglecting the things that nourish me, I need to figure this out. I told her I want to create boundaries so that I turn my work brain off to recharge. “Ugh, you’re probably going to tell me to meditate,” I said. She said not necessarily. Not in the sense of sitting on a cushion. But in the sense of being mindful and noticing when I’m thinking about work? Yes.
She suggested I start simple. If I want to preserve my morning time for quiet — for journaling, for reading, for looking out the window — I need to resist logging on to work before I intend for my work day to start. If I pull out my laptop to blog, I need to not “check Slack real quick” like I almost did when I lifted the cover today to write this post.
I’ve practiced all this week. It’s been hard. When I catch myself thinking about work outside of work hours, I tell myself, “I can think about this at 8am tomorrow.” If it’s something I need to remember and that’s why it’s bothering me, I set myself a reminder in a personal Slack with girlfriends.
It’s been hard but it’s also been wonderful. Yesterday morning I sat by the window and watched a robin pull fibers out of the shredded bark mulch and swoop under the stairs to add them to a nest. I watched him spar with another male to defend his territory — they twirled aggressively in the air, whipping their wings, until one finally chased the other off and the fat female came hopping out to say yeah, get out of here. Meanwhile two goldfinches courted down by the mailbox. The pear trees have filled out with chartreuse leaves, and the pink dogwoods raise their salmon colored flowers to the sun.
This morning, a robin again hops around in the flower bed, gathering nest materials. I’m writing a blog post. I’ll read a bit when I’m done. And at work? My brain has felt fresher each day thanks to the rest.
Today I board a flight for my annual girls’ weekend, and I could not be more ready. I realized this morning that I haven’t taken more than a long weekend off from work since I returned from my sabbatical in July. I felt a huge release yesterday at the end of my work day, when I could finally turn my brain off. I probably shouldn’t have waited this long.
March is here, and I am ready for it. I started running again once it warmed up a little bit. I ran outside 3 or 4 times in the past couple of weeks, in short sleeves, and the warm sun on my arms has been glorious. Right now, our windows are open, and I sit in our living room in long sleeves, with a blanket and a cat on my lap, while I listen to birds twitter outside.
The snowdrops and purple crocuses are in bloom at the top of the hill, and I pruned the rose bushes last weekend. I’m not taking a full week off of work for my girls weekend, but at the end of March I will: I’ve put my annual gardening vacation on the calendar. As the days lengthen and the ground warms, I stand at the back door and plan.
Or, I try to plan. For five years, I’ve had a beautiful bed of echinacea in the back garden. Nothing bothered it: not rabbits, not deer. It filled in with broad green leaves by mid-summer, bloomed in magenta coneflowers in July and August, and dried down to spiky seed heads that goldfinches perch and preen on in September and October. Last year, a groundhog found my beautiful bountiful bed and trampled it. It ate all the leaves so that nothing was left but stems, then crushed the stems beneath its gallumping gait. I adore the groundhog, and also, I want my flowers. I don’t know how to solve this problem.
But as I mentioned at the top, my brain is currently off, so I’m not going to think about that now. Right now I’m going to make myself some snacks for the flight, pet the purring cat on my lap, and listen to the birds.
Over the holidays, when I worked most days and my team encouraged me to take time off, I promised them and myself that I’d take a day off in January instead. Today is that day.
Today is also a day that an epic winter storm is bearing down on us, though you’d never know from the sunny sky. For my day off, I’d planned to swim at 7am instead of 5:30, and then to toodle around our tiny downtown. Get some coffee. Walk to the book store. Then go home and relax on the new love seat with a book, or maybe, if I’m lucky, thanks to our son who gave me a subscription for Christmas, with the latest issue of The New Yorker if it lands in our mailbox today. I hope I have it in hand when the weather arrives.
And I did all of those morning things. I just inserted a few other things as well. Like find all of our power banks and charge them. Dust off the camp stove, test if it still works, buy fuel. Stock up on cat food, bring in firewood, wash and dry clothes, grind coffee (I still need to do this one). Marvel at the line out the door at the hardware store for snow shovels, salt, and generators. Consider what’s sold out at the grocery store: water, tortilla chips, yogurt. Hope we have enough food and firewood if we lose power, and our whole region loses power, and we have to go several days with high temperatures in the teens and no heat or range or oven or hot water.
It’s strange knowing this storm is coming and then also just going about my regular day. It’s so pretty out! I added a couple of walking stops on my little morning jaunt from the coffee shop to the book store. Our CEO gave us homework this week to go to a museum. At first I thought, We don’t have a museum in town. How will I do this?
Then I remembered the performing arts center sometimes has exhibits, and there’s a historic house in town that’s been converted into a local history museum that sometimes has art.
After I drank my coffee with the paper — an actual newspaper! I pick them up sometimes now after reading Beth Macy’s Paper Girl — I bundled up and began my walk to the other side of town where the book store is. I stopped in the performing arts center, but it was between exhibits, so I just appreciated the architecture for a few minutes, and the airy space full of light.
Next I stopped at the Alexander Black House. I’ve passed this building at least a thousand times in the however many years we’ve lived here.
14. That’s how many years.
Anyway, this house is unusual for this town — the architecture is unlike anything else here — and at least half of those thousand times that I’ve passed it, I’ve thought, I wonder what it’s like in there? Well today I found out because I went in.
Alexander Black House
Inside, a local high school exhibited artwork — photographs, block prints, paintings — and I loved putting the pieces together of “They must have had an assignment about eyes” and seeing the different interpretations from these creative minds.
My favorite part of the museum was a room restored to look like it would have in the early 1900s when it was lived in. Look at the wallpaper! I just love it. Someone should bring wallpaper back.
Wallpaper, dado rail, and wainscoting
Now I’m back home with a blanket on my lap, a hot cup of orange tea, and the sun shining through the window. Our forecast has gone from a prediction of 2 feet of snow to now just 4-9 inches, but of snow, sleet, and ice. The latter will be heavy and treacherous. We don’t need to drive, thankfully, but the weight of ice is bad news for downed power lines.
I want to bring in just a little more firewood, then cover the woodpile with a tarp. I’m hoping all these preparations won’t been necessary. It’s really not fun to lose electricity in subarctic temperatures. My favorite part of every day in winter is climbing into our warm bed after turning on our heated mattress pad. It’s so luxurious to preheat the sheets! We can’t do that without power. We can pull camp mattresses and sleeping bags next to the fireplace though.
Daily writing prompt
Name an attraction or town close to home that you still haven’t got around to visiting.
