Being There

It’s been well-stated that I can suffer from a distracted mind. I focus on “what’s next” and how quickly I can get through the current activity or task. Sometimes that is to my great advantage. I’ve been heralded by every supervisor I’ve ever had for being the “most efficient” employee each has ever seen. And I don’t doubt that’s true. At work, one of my greatest strengths is being able to live with an existing system for a certain period of time, before I instinctively determine what is essential, and what can be altered. Soon enough I have a new workflow which may reduce production time (and headaches) several-fold. Then, I get to enjoy the task of seeing what else can be crammed into a work day that previously had seemed like it had too few hours.

What’s next?

Unfortunately, though, turning off those instincts can be an insurmountable challenge at times. And by saying “at times”, I’m being quite generous, because those “times” are any period when I’m not at one of my jobs, where I am paid to be efficient.

Home life can be tough. Sometimes as a reward, my wife will suggest I sit down and relax, while she takes care of this or that. For someone in my state of mind, there can be nearly no worse penalty than this reward. I am much more comfortable, and my mind more settled, ironically, when I am allowed to “putter” around the house, aimlessly it seems, from one room to the next, always with several projects in mind, music playing in one room, television in the other, and without a need for a chair all day long. I know it sounds like the wanderings of a mad-man, but the thing is, all those projects will get done. And I’ll finally have a clear enough mind to sit down to a brief game of Dr. Mario or episode of Seinfeld, free to actually enjoy the relaxing, as I was meant to.

Three hundred words of backstory seems hardly enough in this case. You’d have to live with me or someone as annoying as me, I think, to fully understand.

But, this past weekend (as discovered Monday, actually), I felt as though I achieved some unexpected clarity. I say it was unexpected, because typically I experience these moments only on extended periods of time when I have been permitted to shut off complete parts of my life. I work in academia, where the school literally shuts itself down for Christmas week, and my church choir job takes a welcome one-week respite following the challenges associated with Advent and Christmas Eve. On that week, annually, I find some opportunities to relax, without guilt, because I am given a chance to focus on things “closer to home” (bills, cleaning), which then give me the chance to really enjoy those things I honestly appreciate more in life than any other (chats, movies, games). We’ll get back to this in a minute.

Expected Clarity

During a recent vacation week, my wife and I headed to our home away from home in the White Mountains. We make it to New Hampshire twice a year now and I’ve previously stated, that that is the place where I allow myself to live life. I’ve been there year-after-year for as long as I’ve been around, so if we get there one year and want to do something, we already know where everything is, but if we just feel like sitting inside, we know we’re not really missing out on the excitement that comes from exploring a new vacation spot.

During last summer’s visit to Loon Mountain, a book caught my eye on the small shelf of a “lending library”. I can’t even remember the name of it now (I could verify it very quickly, but won’t, because that’s part of my point). The yellow one about a talking monkey by Michael Crichton. And, to everyone in my family’s surprise, I read the whole book, “from beginning to end. In that order”! When in my life do I allow myself the chance to sift through hundreds of pages without a life goal associated with it? To read a book which a year later, I won’t even remember the title of with confidence, but for which I’ll still remember the opera that was concurrently playing on my mini speaker, and the photography experiments my wife was conducting? Reading that book was an experience.

And so, in an effort to preserve that lightning in a bottle, throughout the spring, I planned to visit that lending shelf again. This time, I was drawn to Tuesdays with Morrie, the memoir that had born-agains flocking to book groups in the earlier years of this century. I’d never gotten around to reading it myself (obviously) but after seeing in the first few pages that Morrie had been a local professor, I thought it was worth a shot (and there weren’t a lot of words on each page). I had a hard time with that book. Not in finishing it, that happened in less than a day. When it was written, people around the globe held it high for changing their lives. There were some marvelous images, and excellent quotes, certainly, but by the end, I found that I hadn’t really “learned” much. And, so I began to think about those fellow readers. Before I began reading, I had already known most of what the author discovered about his life through those meetings with his former professor. It’s one of the easiest things in my life to appreciate what I have going for me.

Contrived Clarity

I don’t uphold the way I live life distractedly. As my school yoga teacher says weekly, “recognize it, but don’t judge”. So, I’ve stopped kicking myself about it, but pay close attention to those times when worry or preoccupation find their way into my daily life. I purposely manage the times in which I “play with” my phone when the actual event is happening in front of my nose (real people in the room who are there to be with me, the real event I paid to see, etc.). And that management has become almost second nature. I’m proud of that.

But I still struggle with a cluttered mind. That’s not as easy to put back in my pocket.

And so, finally, back to this past weekend, my birthday weekend. We rarely have the resources to “go all out” on our birthdays, but we do find meaningful ways to use what we have to celebrate what really matters. So, during last week, though I tried not to be obnoxious about it, I couldn’t help but wonder what might be coming up for my birthday weekend. Little by little, I learned that we were going to see our close friends one night, attend the birthday of a one-year-old complete with rented petting zoo (which I could totally adapt in my mind as my cake, my goat, and so on), and that we’d play mini golf with my sister’s family the following day. I was even playing the church service on Sunday, so I had the opportunity to perform whatever pieces meant the most to me at that moment.

Unexpected Clarity

And, it all came to pass. And I was in the moment. I was mindful of every step, and it all mattered. Twice that weekend, I suffered unbelievably slow restaurant service, and neither time did I care. I noticed those at the table with me checking their watches, tempted by their own phones, but mine stayed deep in my pocket. For some reason, I had no interest in missing out on anything that was going on in front of me. A few snarls presented themselves, things that weren’t expected to be a part of the weekend, but I adapted easily to them as well.

Why was this the case? I can’t say for sure. Obviously it had to do with my birthday, and being made to feel a bit more special than usual. Maybe I thought that others deserved to see the best, most present, side of me since they had taken time out of their day to spend it with me. I could probably come up with several potential explanations, but I’m not sure any one would be the “correct” answer.

This felt like a four-day weekend, but it wasn’t. It was a two-day weekend. When I look back on it, we probably didn’t spend too many more hours engaged with other people or in unusual activities than we do on many weekends. The difference, though, was that I was there for the whole thing. And I still remember what I was doing, eating, saying, listening to during each and every hour, several days later.

Several years back, during one of the many anniversary shows celebrating a Simpsons milestone of some sort, I saw an interview in which Homer was described as the most “all-in” guy imaginable. Associated clips passed by, showing that whether he was making the right choices or not (completely irrelevant), he was always present, engaged, and completely on board. The same is true, we’ve found, for Frank on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. With him, nearly every case is misguided, but I have come to taking great joy in watching Danny DeVito’s enthusiastic acting, often in the background, or on the periphery of the frame.

This weekend, I think I was getting myself on the right path. And, if I can use a birthday weekend as a triumphal starting point for a new year’s resolution, if you will, then I just may be a fully changed person a year from now. I expect some blunders along the way, but I intend to be all-in more often. Knowing what matters most, that’s always been easy for me. With a wife, a family, friends, faith, and a pair of jobs like I have, I’d been a sad, sad man not to appreciate it all.

Time to take it up a notch.