Archive for April 2012
Purposeful Disarray
Okay, so, I am in the middle of total disarray at home, due to the project to fix up the house to put it on the market… In many ways it is commanding the majority of my attention away from other, more pleasurable, pursuits. I am aware that in time, this period will be forgotten, replaced by the drama of a next adventure.
It takes extra effort to view the immediate stresses of life with perspective of the greater world around us. Doing so helps me to tolerate the disarray as a temporary inconvenience, even as it stretches from days to weeks. There are a great many hardships that make my situation appear rather luxurious in comparison.
Heck, it doesn’t even deserve to be framed as an inconvenience, if I were willing to go that far. I could embrace this with a purposefulness that sees it as my primary accomplishment. This is exactly what I am supposed to be doing: living in my little one-room “fort” that I have created, surrounded by the upturned legs of furniture stacked around me.
From that perspective, it is not something I would ever want to forget, but at the same time, it is not something I want to be talking about forever, either.
When you have opportunity to socialize with acquaintances, it would be awkward to try to present yourself at that moment by including the full gamut of experience you have lived. We quite naturally become an amalgam of our life-experiences, and can’t help but present that version of ourselves to the world of people with whom we interact. But it seems to leave out so much.
At the same time, imagine trying to consume the full range of life experiences coming at you from every other person in attendance. It would be impractical.
Plenty of people have already lived through the very same phase of home projects that I am going through right now. Like many things in life –buying a car, raising a child, caring for elders, interviewing for jobs– the mere mention of the subject brings a nod of recognition and understanding.
There are also less common experiences, which fade into our past –saving a life after witnessing an accident, working in a forest paradise in Portugal, donating stem cells to an ailing sibling, standing in the high Himalayan mountains of Nepal– and which go on to become invisible threads of a distinct personal history.
Living in a confined space, surrounded by stacked furniture is a phase I probably will appreciate differently, after it is done and, hopefully, replaced by something with a more comforting feng shui.
I look forward to that, but for the moment, I will think of life in this current disarray as what I am supposed to be doing.
Nothing
.
.
there is nothing
in the emptiness
no courage
not a hint
no sound
tiny little bits
and a great big
mass
of nothing
devoid
of purpose
hollow
filled with a lack
of anything
a vacancy
that somehow
ends up
still being
something
.
.
.
Temporary Flight
I have to run in to the day-job and tend to a few things today. Business is strong right now and it is overflowing our capacity a bit. A good problem to have, but I’d rather have my weekend to myself, thank you.
To compensate for today’s hours, I snuck out a little early yesterday and was able to get some outdoor chores taken care of at home. In the past, I had my area of focus in our landscape, and Cyndie had her own. It occurred to me that I must take on the whole of the chore. Dandelions used to be her domain. Ugh. And I’m pretty sure there won’t be as many annual flowers gracing our property as before.
In the middle of raking and pruning yesterday, I stepped into a thick cloud of tiny flying creatures. I made a point to hold my breath and soldiered on. Then I quickly forgot about them. When you live alone, there is no one watching your back. I was lucky to catch a brief glimpse over my shoulder in the bathroom mirror and saw that the back of my shirt was a mess. I figured it was from when I laid down to rest my back after pruning branches. Those degenerating discs don’t react kindly to yard work, by the way.
Then I noticed the debris covering the back of my shirt, and I do mean covering, …was moving. The gazillions of tiny little creatures were all wandering around on my back! Yikes. I would have been happy to have someone just brush them off for me. Instead, I had to delicately get the shirt up over my head and off of my back. I guess the little guys hadn’t developed their confidence with flight. After finding my perch, they seemed satisfied to remain with their feet in contact with something.
I must have showed up in the right spot just at the time the throngs went airborne. I remember thinking it did seem like an unusually thick cloud of insects.
Era Ends
In this day and age of instant communication, it is an interesting psychological torture to need to ask someone a question, but be unable to reach them by phone, or email, or FaceTime, or text message, day after day. Of course, eventually, the question becomes moot.
So, maybe the question never needed to be asked in the first place.
Life goes on, sure. But it would be more pleasant with some answers for those questions that apparently don’t need to be asked.
It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t know there was technology that allowed for instant answers. This must be what it was like to live in the time before electricity was harnessed. Cool.
Meanwhile, on a subject that involved no questions, yesterday I made a great big decision, all by myself. I finally called the health club where our morning futsal games are played and asked to have my membership canceled. I am no longer going to run up and down that wood-floor basketball court in the mornings before heading off to the day-job.
The club requires members to come to the club to cancel their membership, so I made a point of walking the distance, as an act of defiance for the circumstances that have taken away my ability to play soccer in the mornings. I can still walk with the best of them.
It is a milestone. I’ve been playing that game with those friends for decades. I’m framing it as another step toward preparing myself to move away from here and live somewhere rural with some horses.
I will go for walks with the horses.
Invention Needed
It’s funny how easy it can be to live separated from my wife, for varying spans of time, and then, suddenly, it becomes overwhelmingly burdensome.
One thing I noticed this week, that seems to have dragged my spirit down, is a brief call from Cyndie that announced the end of the workshop she had been at; one which had put her out of contact with me over the weekend.
Actually, that doesn’t read right. It wasn’t that phone call that brought me down. That call was incredibly energizing. I knew she would be flying back to Boston that day and I was really hoping she would call. I was absolutely thrilled to receive it and hear her joyful voice, filled with a vibrant sparkle created by her experience at Linda Kohanov’s place in Arizona.
The problem was, it was just a brief check-in to let me know she had safely arrived in Boston. We both had things going on that evening and so we hoped to catch each other later.
It didn’t happen.
Now another day has passed and I expect that she is deeply entrenched in the heavy grind and long hours that is the reality of her work in Boston.
I think the situation that has created my current pouting is that all-too-brief moment of bliss, when I heard her voice, which brought my excitement up, followed by the dashed hopes for more of the same, because the night ended without our connecting.
The higher the high, the lower the low.
Her absence in the days following create a weight on my shoulders. Each successive task seems increasingly onerous. I become less and less interested in the options I have before me, because none of them involve talking with my wife.
I like living alone. It’s just that I’d like to live alone and live with my wife at the same time.
I don’t think they’ve invented that yet.
Smelling Progress
My living quarters are now filled with the distinct aroma of joint compound curing. It smells like progress.
One big improvement that probably doesn’t stand out, is the fresh ceiling in the bedroom. We are getting rid of the textured finish. It had accumulated 35 years of dust and smoke from candles, and had one bad spot that at the very least would have forced us to try to match the old texture after a repair. Easier, and cleaner, to just scrape off the texture and give it a clean finish.
Repairs Begin
Thank goodness that Monday has arrived and I can go to the day-job so I can get some rest. I worked all weekend on final preparations to have the house ready for the drywall professionals to fix our ceilings and clean up a few dings in the walls. They start today. Luckily, yesterday I had the services of Julian for the whole day to help accomplish the bulk of the work. What a blessing his assistance was!
After we got things pretty much under control, we took advantage of the nice weather and washed our cars in the driveway. I took a moment or two to rake up the winter’s worth of leaves that had taken up residence along the edges of the street around our lot. I’ll be doing double duty now that it’s time for yard work again. If we are going to be showing the house to prospective buyers, I will need to maximize the curb-appeal. I have work to do inside and outside now!
By the end of the day, we had cleaned out a lot of rooms, and stuffed everything we could into a couple of others. The library room is getting a little claustrophobic, for all we left open was a narrow path to the bed. We stacked the furniture so that it towers over it. I can tolerate this for a while, I think. It’s all for the good of the dream.
If I could only remember where the heck I put everything, when the time comes that I will need to find something specific.
The real test will come when the painting starts. I may not want to be sleeping here during that phase. Maybe that will be time to break out the tent, eh?
Many Connections
Patiently chipping away at tasks this weekend, and attempting to do so mindful of the bigger picture of our dream, to keep the work from becoming burdensome. I’m tired, and I find myself lonesome for Cyndie’s energy for this type of work.
Yesterday morning, I received a surprise call from Cyndie. I had not talked with her much the week prior, as she was burdened with another exceptionally difficult week in Boston, and I expected that she would be out of communication until next Tuesday while she is attending a 4-day Epona Equestrian Services workshop with author Linda Kohanov in Arizona. Cyndie said she found there was a cell signal and couldn’t wait to tell me the wonderful connection she discovered there.
Cyndie was telling Linda about a friend she has in Portugal, a man by the name of Ian. Cyndie reported that Linda’s face suddenly lit up with excitement, “Ian Rowcliffe? You know Ian Rowcliffe!?”
What a treat that discovery must have been. I was lucky to catch Ian online for a brief chat, shortly after my phone call with Cyndie, and passed along the news. Cyndie and I did not know that Ian had been in contact with Linda over the internet.
There appears to be another connection going on for Cyndie. Obviously, with the difficult week she just had in Boston, which in actuality is an extension of the difficult previous months that job is proving to be, that work is the center of her attention as she enters the workshop with horses. These few days in Arizona will be a chance to replenish her energies, but even more pertinent, they may provide knowledge that will be essential to the effort she is putting forth to support Superintendent Carol Johnson in the Boston Public Schools.
It is as if she is trying to do two things at once, train with horses, and work in Boston. Could be that the two things are actually one.
Relative Something 