Identity

Both Hands


my android apps menu #5

Image by laihiu via Flickr

My boss called today. Yes, I have a boss. I know it seems like I’m living this Life of Reilly up on the prairie, but I am employed. I am hired in a manner of speaking though it is so different from my previous existence as a public school teacher that when I come up for air, now and again, I blink a lot. That spotlight I try to hide from is bright.

Cee conducts these random phone updates with the bloggers at Care2 to take our enthusiasm temperatures, I think. Mine’s been flagging a bit. Partly because I know that in order to be a success as a pseudo commentator on current events and life in general I need to lay fingers on the keyboard more often and far more furiously than I do now. And, I need to check my scruples at my office door. Blogging for the masses – the hordes that feed the advertisers – means inciting them to comment.

You might have noted that I closed comments on my Jennifer Petkov piece due to a persistent commenter. I don’t feel the need to engage in that way and this is a personal blog at any rate, but it’s highly reminiscent of the type of response I’ve inspired at Care2 from time to time. My karma prefers to be less sullied but my ego is entirely game. Let the tug of war begin.

So, on the one hand there is the very real possibility of making my mark in the world of op-ed and on the other hand there is coming back in my next life as an invertebrate.

Okay, it’s not that black and white. Probably.

Mostly this is coming down to time. Which is precious even if it’s nothing more than sitting in the office with Rob in the evening sharing thoughts about items on our Google Readers.

However, I don’t have as much time as I did.

My other boss emailed me today. Yes, two bosses though Jade’s in a gray area. She’s my teacher. I like to think of her as a friend. And she lets me teach at her studio.

Jade’s off on a yoga cruise soon. The studio was supposed to close because Rob and I had planned a vacation for that week, but we’ve decided to demolish the wall between our living and dining rooms and reno instead – seriously, and I will explain that another day – so I am suddenly around and she asked if I will cover classes for those who have memberships.

Teaching yoga is feast or famine. I am busy beyond comprehension until Christmas and then …? I don’t know.

Here’s the thing. My old life was scripted from the outside. Order was imposed on me by a schedule not of my making. Not a bad thing because being a Sagittarius, I tend towards free flow and formless when left to my own devices.

Now, life needs order.

Why?

Because I am not – never have been – okay with just being good. At anything. I need to be awesome. Ego. Yes, I am well aware.

But, I can be awesome. I know this.

I am ruined though by twenty years of being scheduled. I wish I had shunned teaching for writing earlier. Maybe I would have a better handle on scheduling myself?

Both hands are required. Cee gave me license to write at will for any channel I want at Care2. Go nuts. There’s a career in there somewhere.

Jade is trusting me an awful lot to find my yoga feet, take root and bloom. There’s a future there too.

Are they compatible? I think so, but it’s a matter of blocking time and not losing sight of Rob, the girls and the other people who are far more important than anything else.

Life was easier when I didn’t have to think about where I should be at a given time. When it was all decided for me.

But I recall, vaguely, wishing for this freedom. Must. Control. Blind. Wishing. And possibly break down and get a Blackberry or an Android.

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My Life as a House


The quaintly cliché notion that surrounds terminal illness has no better friend than fiction.

I suppose if one has never watched another die than the idea that fleeting finality will coalesce into heartwarming relationship building that shores the foundations of love so that it may bear the separation and even jump-start positive growth experiences is comforting. As it is meant to be. But it’s not real.

Rob and I watched Kevin Kline’s 2001 film entitled Life as a House last evening. Of course, Kline’s character is dying. Naturally he is estranged from his child, ex-wife and living life in general prior to receiving his personal wake up call. And as most dying people do, he decides to demo the shack he lives in – interestingly situated on prime California ocean front property – to build a new home to leave to his sixteen year old son.

Although, the house is the least of what Kline’s character hopes to leave behind, a loft full of death-fueled ambition propels this man.

And it’s predictable. Epiphanies pop like flower buds in the morning sun after a night’s rain. Good is rewarded and annoying folk awarded their comeuppance.

Kline’s character dies more convincingly than 99.9% of the screen deaths I have seen. Having stood bedside myself, I am morbidly critical of fake death. His last moments struck truth. Not that I care all that much to see accurate death-bed scenes, but I hate it when they are prettied up.

Admittedly, given Rob’s recent heart attack, Dee’s birthday with all its memories, and it being the season of “anniversaries”*, we probably should’ve watched that horrid Vince Vaughan tripe holiday throwaway I found the last time we were at the book mobile.

But we are fond of Kline. He’s also worth watching. Vince? Not so much.

What’s stuck with me today though is  the lessons thing. That when someone becomes so ill that death is inevitable, those around learn something from that person’s grace under pressure example. Dying people are seen as sages and their loved ones gather at their feet like disciples at the Last Supper.

It’s not like that. Love is more often left hanging on whatever peg it was carelessly allowed to dangle on and recalcitrant children opt to revert even further to the typecasting of their younger selves. Neighbors more often decide to scuttle like roaches than step up and words are left unsaid that need to be spoken and shouted that should be swallowed.

The whole stoic saint persona was/continues to be the most difficult for me.

Rob’s recent brush with acute illness sharply reminded me that I function better in long seige conditions and not in the initial skirmishes when the enemy’s unknown and the terrain is new.

But I did like the house analogy. Death is a metaphor’s goldmine. To me it makes total sense that the old is razed and the new is rebuilt atop. Phoenix from ash. Apt.

I dream a lot about houses. They are never finished and I am usually in transit from one to another. They are always in the college town of long ago, which symbolically makes no sense aside from the education aspect.

I wonder sometimes what it will mean if I should ever dream that I am in a finished house. Of course, I will have to actually live in one first as I need a template.

Three houses passed university and not one ever “done”. Now there is a better analogy for my life.

Best line – “Change can be so slow that you don’t know if your life is better or worse until it is.” That, thank goodness, is not one of my analogies.

*I think the whole anniversary of deaths, non-birthdays, non-wedding anniversaries and – worst of all, in my own opinion – the idea that events leading up to deaths should be observed in any way are products of a society lulled into the false belief that death is the trauma that keeps on refueling. And that ‘s it better to acknowledge and acquiecse to it than simply acknowledge and get back to daily life. I read accounts of people who literally lose weeks to gearing up and ramping down. If I took time out to do more than simply recall that “oh yeah, that happened today”, I would never get up off the floor in the corner I was curled up in. I’d be like that old SNL skit. “Yes, the late Mr. Loomis used to lay in a basket by the door. He had no spine, you know. God rest his soul.”  If grief is a 12 step process, and I suspect strongly that it isn’t, it’s not productive to recycle it yearly. No good can come out of  that kind of hindsight flogging.

A Life’s Purpose


What if what I am supposed to be doing is exactly what I am doing?

I ask only because I read a blog entry of a friend who is searching for her direction in life. Or redirection. We can never assume, after all, that where we are, what we are doing or who we surround ourselves with is permanent.

Life is about change – at its core – not about permanence.

I was a teacher for twenty years. When I left, I can count on one hand the number of minutes it took for someone to ask,

“So what are you going to do now?”

As if emigrating to Canada, remarrying and focusing on my writing/blogging in addition to giving the stay at home mom thing a full-time go for the first time in the five years I’d been a mother wasn’t enough.

What are you going to do with your life?

So that it’s meaningful – in the eyes of the world – is the question behind that question.

But what if, maybe, I am doing what I am meant to do?

Given that nothing is permanent, and I can reasonably expect the circumstances of my life to change over the course of time, why couldn’t what I am doing … right now … be what I am meant to do? Right now.

And isn’t that enough?

Writing for blogs, studying yoga with an eye towards teaching a few classes – maybe having a studio one day – isn’t nothing. Though I recognize that like “having it all” or “having enough” it is an eye of the beholder thing.

Does anyone’s eye matter but mine in the assessment of what makes my life meaningful or gauging what I should be doing with my life?

I think not.

And a life’s “purpose” is more than what one does in terms of culture’s obsession with the idea of work and career (which, frankly, is the measuring stick in our Western world to an unhealthily large degree).

What if, what you are doing right now and where you are is “it”?

For now.