musings

Our family resolutions, on New Year’s Eve, with our up-much-later-than-usual tree visible in the background.

I’ve started the last few years writing about things I know, which is my version, I suppose of resolutions.  This year, Grace asked all of us to write down three resolutions on a paper star and hung all 12 of them from the chandelier in our dining room.  Over dinner, with our star-shaped resolutions spinning gently in the air above us, we talked about them.  Mine were pretty simple: Be here now, meditate 5 minutes every single day (I want to take a several-times-a-week habit and commit to it as a daily one in 2016), and stop snapping at my family.

In general, though, I don’t much go for making resolutions.  Rather, reflecting on what the year that’s closed has taught me feels like a good way to move forward into a new one.  So, with that in mind, I’ve been mulling for several weeks what I know now.  These dovetail, I find, with the resolutions I articulated when Grace asked me to.

I know that I need 8 hours of sleep.  I also know that I am prone to insomnia.  These two incontrovertible truths are often at odds with each other.

I know that the fastest way to gratitude and awareness of my blessings is paying attention to what’s right in front of me.

I know that I love most of all the three people I live with.  It is too easy to treat those who are closest to us poorly.  We trust them, and so we fall apart with them.  But this is backwards.  They deserve the best of us, not the worst.

I know that I happier when I move my body every day.  Yoga, walking, running, spinning; it can take lots of shapes.  But it helps me sleep, it helps me be present, it helps me inhabit my physical self and thus my own life.

I know that my intuition about people and situations – which I refer to as my Spidey Sense – is very rarely wrong.  I need to start trusting it more often.

I know that poetry is my lingua franca, the language my soul speaks.  I need to read it often.

What do you know?  What are your resolutions, if you make them?

I write a lot about the various lines of poetry and song that come to mind for me, apparently unbidden, and about the mysterious calculus that surely underlines this process.  Why am I thinking of certain words at certain times? Sometimes I can’t get specific lines of poems or songs out of my head.  For what felt like months at a time, a few years ago, Let It Be was on the radio whenever I turned it on.  I love Let It Be, but it being on the radio felt a little less obvious than, say, Bad Blood.  It took me an embarassingly long time to realize that probably somewhere, somewhat, or something was trying to tell me to, you know, let it be.

What I can’t stop hearing in my head these days are TS Eliot’s famous lines from Four Quartets (which I re-read last year, and highly recommend, particularly for some reason in this season):

we must be still and still moving

I’ve always understood these poetic words to mean that life is about stillness in the midst of motion.  I don’t know if that’s what TS Eliot means, but it’s what it means to me. That life won’t ever actually stop (God willing, not for a while) so what I need to try to do is find stillness, whatever that means, in the middle of constant motion.

December is a busy month for all of us.  Right now, for me, what’s creating that busy-ness is work, not social engagements, though there’s also simultaneous pressure to wrap gifts and address holiday cards and trim the tree.  It is also the month when I want most to be still.  This paradox is at the heart of the dissonance many of us feel at the holidays, I’m sure of it.  There’s something magical about all this light in the darkness, some deep-seated longing we have to touch something ephemeral and essential at this time of year.  And yet the frantic do-ing sometimes occludes our ability to do this.

I’ve written a lot about the ways our family has pared back at the holidays and tried to simplify how we celebrate and what we do.  While there’s more we could do, I’m grateful that we do usually have an opportunity to sit by the tree and listen to carols and drink hot chocolate.  I have one more trip ahead of me and then I can settle into home – hours at the computer notwithstanding – until the new year.

This seems to be a lesson I need to keep learning (like so many of them!).  There is no slowing down of life, so the slowing down needs to be internal.  It’s on me.  Only I can learn to still and still moving, but it might be the most important thing I do in my entire life.

And so, once again, I recommit to that.  To sitting still, to breathing deeply, to reading with my children, to admiring the Christmas lights, to being here now.  That’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it?  To the tattoo-I-would-have, to the three words I return to over and over again: be here now.

The ragged-edged morning moon, 7:20am, 11/29/15, the first day of Advent

I’ve written at length about light and darkness, and about this season of darkness.  Along with time’s breathless passage and the confounding nature of memory, I think you could call this one of my writing’s – and my living’s – central themes.

The winter solstice is, I think, the holiest day of the year for me.  I feel more connected to the deep currents of energy that run through the universe on that day than any other.  On December 21st I feel plugged into something essential, primal, and inchoate as I literally sense the planet turning under my feet.

Somehow the beginning of Advent brings all of this to life: this dark season and the light that is held within it, the holiness that seems to drift just beyond my grasp during December, my keen sense of the world’s rotation.

I’m not a particularly religious person in the traditional sense of the word, though we are formally Episcopalian.  We attend services on holidays and were married in that church as well as baptized our children in it.  But Advent has always felt meaningful to me, a month of waiting, waiting for an arrival, for a birth, to turn back towards the light.  We have an Advent wreath on our kitchen island, with one candle for each week (ours are non-traditionally all white, rather than the pink/purple combo that is more classic).

With every year that passes, I grow more comfortable with this season’s darkness.  Whether that reflects a commensurate embrace of life’s darkness, I don’t know, but I suspect it does.  I have a very vivid memory of an evening at my first job, the fall of 1996, sitting on the 31st floor of an office building and noticing that it was dark at 4:15.  I recall – one of those mundane moments that is fixed brightly in my memory, for some reason I still don’t totally understand – a wave of comfort, and even happiness.  For the first time I was aware of welcoming the darkness, of feeling it like a warm embrace, rather than something I fear or dread.  That has been a bit more true every year.

I only chose a word of the year twice, but the most recent one was light.  Even then I acknowledged that you have to have darkness to appreciate light.  Perhaps that’s what my increasing comfort in this darkest season is about.  It’s the dark days of December that give June’s endless light its flavor.  It’s the darkness of life – and there is plenty of that right now, that’s for sure – that highlights all that is light. And still, even in a season of dark and cold and endless shootings and fear and reminders of how intensely fragile it all is, there are joys and there is light.  There is the garland wound up the staircase of our little house, and the ornaments that have so many special memories attached and the olive wood creche that my sister gave us from Bethlehem.  Somehow, in my midlife, I am really at peace letting the dark crowd around me, maybe because the glittering lights are ever more evident.  I think always of Wendell Berry’s lines,

My favorite line from Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, which I read this weekend.  I think you could say that a central task of adulthood for me has been stripping away whatever is unnecessary so that I can be sure to be present for the small and the daily, which is where I find life.

On my post marking nine years of blogging (O.M.G.) I asked if there were specific things people wanted to hear about.  More than one person asked a version of how do I balance it, how do I make time for writing, how do I juggle the various responsibilities that are a part of my life.  And then, about a month ago, a reader and friend wrote me an email with some more questions about making time for writing and it felt right to answer these queries in a post.

I’ve written about time before.  It’s one of the themes I circle around, like a black hole, drawn inexorably into its orbit.  I believe firmly that time is life’s only true zero-sum resource.  My life is replete with both joys and responsibilities.  I work full time.  I have limited childcare because I want to be Grace and Whit’s primary caretaker.  I don’t have a lot of help with household tasks and I am responsible for most domestic chores.  I keep a pad of paper on my desk, between my two computers (I have a laptop for work and a laptop for personal things, on which I do my writing and my blogging).  On that pad of paper is a running to-do list for household/life things, and I fill the page every couple of days.  I’m looking at it right now, and it says: UPS store, laundry, Whole Foods, Grace Thanksgiving food contribution, birthday card to Alexandra, post office, dry cleaner, order holiday gifts for godchildren, send book to Gloria.

One thing I know for sure is everybody feels busy.  No matter what our lives consist of, they all feel full.  And this feeling is all that matters.  I don’t participate in the societal glorification of busy that I see all around me, and I refuse to compare my life to anyone else’s.  That is just irrrelevant.  As I tell Grace all the time: run your own race.  That’s all any of us can do.

So how do I do it?  When do I make time for writing?  What does my life look like?  I wish I had good, clear answers here, but I don’t.

All I know is this: I have prioritized what matters to me.  I’ve made choices.  I’ve let a lot of things go. 

Once you know what you prize above all else, then how to allocate your time becomes radically clear.  I’ve stripped away almost all claims on my hours other than those belonging to work, family, and writing.  Because time is zero sum, things had to go.  I have many dear friends I very rarely (never) see.  We are often not invited to social events anymore, maybe because I said no several times and maybe because I’m boring.  I’m not on non-profit boards and I rarely go to adult events in the evenings or weekends. That time is for Grace and Whit.  This, the idea that how we spend our time reflects what we value, is a theme I’ve touched on many times before.  We know from Annie Dillard that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend your lives.” Your week is a map of matters to you.  I am deeply comfortable with my map.

I am an extremely structured person so many have been surprised that I have a fluid approach to work/life/writing balance.  I actually dislike the word “balance.”  Maybe it feels better to say that I have a fluid approach to integrating the various essential parts of my life.  I used to write after the children went to bed, but Grace and Whit stay up later now and that doesn’t work anymore.  I also find I am absolutely fried by the end of the day.

So on an average day, I wake up early – 5, 5:30.  Maybe 4 days a week I will go out for a run at that point.  I like being up before most of the rest of the world and find the dark and quiet very soothing.  When I get home, I have my first cup of coffee (this is one of my very favorite moments of the entire day) and take a shower.  Sometimes I still have half an hour before Grace and Whit get up, and I’ll use that time to clear out my work and personal email and to skim the blogs I read daily.

Then it’s up and at ’em.  I wake the children up, make breakfast for them, and take them to school.  I try to leave my phone in my bag during this hour, because I’ve found that I’m materially more present and relaxed with them when I do that.  We live less than a mile from school and could easily walk, but we usually drive because I’d rather they slept the extra 10 minutes in the morning. By 8 I’m at my desk and starting my work day.

While my office is in my house, about 3 or 4 days a week I have to go into Boston or elsewhere for meetings for work.  Most of my days, Monday to Friday, are composed of work.  Occasionally, if I have a 30 minute break in my schedule, I’ll read blogs or check twitter or, even, sometimes, write a quick blog post.

This is true answer to the question of when I write: around the edges of the rest of my life.

There’s no doubt that working at home is essential to my life operating as it does.  Despite the fact that I work a lot of hours, I have a lot of flexibility and I’m hugely grateful for that.  I have wonderful babysitters who pick the children up from school during the week and bring them home, but I’m also around most of the time.  Parenting children of this age feels less outsource-able than any other time before.  I don’t know when it is that they’ll want to talk, and I want to be sure I’m here when they do.  So I put that desire above almost all else.

Most days I take a break from the work computer around 6 to have dinner with Grace and Whit (usually something easy that I put into the oven earlier in the day).  Our babysitters have usually left by then.  After dinner I’ll do another hour or so of work while Grace and Whit are showering and finishing homework or simply puttering.  Many days we have to fit a practice in here too, so I drive several children to the hockey rink or make sure mine are ready to be picked up by a carpool.  My favorite days are the ones where we don’t have practice and life has a slightly slower rhythm.

I spend time with both children before bed, often quietly.  Sometimes we all pile into our bed to read books together.  Sometimes I read Harry Potter or The Golden Compass to one child.  Sometimes we talk about a math problem that is particularly thorny.  Sometimes we discuss what happened that day at school.  In between time with Grace and Whit I’ll check blogs or twitter again, and my email a last time.  I try to have all screens shut down and put away by 9 and that has made a difference in my sleep.  I read 30-45 minutes of an old-fashioned paper book in bed before I go to sleep.

My days tumble by at alarming speed, and many of them have a similar shape.  There is a lot of work, some domestic chores and responsibilities, and time for simply being around my two children.  Matt travels for work and is here some of the time but not all.  As you can see, there isn’t a ton of time for prolonged, focused writing.  I try to spend a couple of hours during the weekend doing that, and I’ve been known to sit at the hockey rink with my computer during a weeknight practice.  But I haven’t written a book yet, that much is clear, and maybe this is part of the reason why.  Blog posts lend themselves to brief windows of time, but sustained narrative works don’t.

I have often exhorted people to stop hiding behind “I don’t have time” and to recognize that what they value they make time for.  If I believe that – and I do – I should own up to not prioritizing writing a book.  When I do work on longer form things (and I have, multiple times) I use Scrivener. I love this software for structuring a book-length work.  I write essays for places other than my blog in Microsoft Word.  I write my blog straight into WordPress.

This entry is long-winded and unstructured, but I think in that way it echoes the topic at hand.  My life, and the days that compose it, aren’t rigidly ordered, either.  I put my professional life and my family life at the top of my priority list (those are the rocks in the jar of my life) and writing and reading come next (the sand that fills in the gaps between the rocks in the jar, to continue that metaphor).

Of course I feel sorrow sometimes at the things I haven’t done and those I don’t do on a regular basis.  I wish I had more time for yoga, more time for my friends, a published book under my belt.  But when I look hard in the mirror, my choices hold up to scrutiny (my own, that is – and nobody else’s matters, does it?).  On the surface, my life may look small, but what I have realized is that tight focus on what I truly value allows me to access a deep, glittering cavern inside.  My life is simultaneously narrow and wide.  I don’t have any true regrets about what I prioritize in my life, and I feel comfortable that anyone can extrapolate from a description of my days what it is I most value.  Do you feel that way?