There’s no doubt that these morning exercises – the meditation followed by these pages here – provide my days with a great sense of beneficial structure. I suppose I notice it most when I’m not feeling at the top of my game, as it were. When I’m feeling a bit flat. This morning I feel flat for no especial reason, and I thought, “Imagine if I didn’t have this routine now.”
At the same time, it really isn’t enough. I spend – tend to spend – the rest of my days in a kind of holding pattern, as if I’m waiting for something. The worst part is that I know it’s a sham, a total fake. Say it’s “the right moment” I’m waiting for. I know a thousand up close and personal ways that there is no and will not be “the right moment.” I know in a thousand acutely embarrassing ways that in actual fact, I just don’t want to get started. Now, I have my excuses – my mother and my mother’s drill (the bit that I shouldn’t set my sights too high, shouldn’t try too hard, as I’ll only be disappointed, for example; the thing my mother told me often enough), boring its way into my brain. But c’mon, the disappointment she translated into my head as outright fear – can’t I have vanquished that by now? Yes and no.
The other part of the equation is the loneliness of trying to do it, go it, alone. I don’t mean that I want an office full of comrades or a posse. …Well, maybe a posse would be nice. Exciting. But some sort of loyal band of fellows, some kind of community engaged in similar work would be nice. Then again, I actually truly like being alone. And, I have a love-hate relationship to / with people. Most of them rather scare me – or at least turn me off. Which is also why I want some more opportunities for highly structured engagement, the kind where everyone can rest assured they’ll go home alone in the end. To recuperate. I always need a lot of time to recuperate after being with people.
This afternoon W. and I are going to Cambridge for the 8th Annual FDR Foundation Memorial Lecture, featuring Henry Cisneros and Sol Trujillo, Democrat and Republican, respectively, talking about Mexico, immigration, etc.
The sun is out, I have let the matchstick blind down almost all the way – it obscures the sun a bit, lets me see just the jumble of rooftops, picket and stockade fences, and cars in driveways. The sky I see through the blind. I can tell it’s a very deep blue evenly dotted with extremely fluffy looking bright white clouds. But apparently it’s not as warm as yesterday, not that it was warm then, really. The cold gives added definition to the clouds, I guess.
Interesting developments in W.’s job search, competition.