Of Rhythm and Purpose
If I write here too often of routine and of schedule it's because routine and schedule not only keeps me alive (T1D management being an essential, practical, and non-insane iteration of the Quantified Self movement (though it does provide its own levels of insanity)) but gives my day a rhythm –
“The wisdom of the journeyman is to work one day at a time and he always said that any job even if it took years was made up out of a day’s work. Nothing more. Nothing less. That was hard for me to learn. I always wanted to be finished. In the concept of a day’s work is rhythm and pace and wholeness.” - Cormac McCarthy, THE STONEMASON.
– and a purpose. It is my cheatsheet through the improvisations required to survive the day with my head still attached to my shoulders, "Puny God" brain-Hulk thrashing, one side to another, kept to a workable minimum.
But the afternoons have always been a dead zone fraught with guilt and the worst ennui has to offer, a place where I left my day open for the needs of others, at their mercy, if for no other reason than to stave off the pangs of guilt that came either from having to do what someone else needed me to do or from not doing the work that gave me purpose; the afternoons were, before, the realm of, as my therapist cleverly concocted, my being a "sheepdog without sheep."
(I also, over the years, concocted the bullshit for myself that I was useless in the afternoons for anything but yard work or menial househusband labors, a useful lie to stave off that pervasive guilt of being who I am.)
And now that I actually do have the time to work in the afternoons, I vacillate between working then or in the evenings, you know, to keep those afternoons open, in the name of consistency. This too, is bullshit.
Vacillate no more, writer boy: for you will – you must – work in the afternoons. You will own your day – the challenge being not so much of getting the words on the page or of overcoming said bullshit concocted but of the cessation of looking over your shoulder, waiting for some emergency, like reversing a ceiling fan, to pop up of which you're the only one they can turn to and who must sacrifice their day and their time to reverse said ceiling fan.
(A theory: the end goal of therapy is to become an astute therapist that operates on your own frequency.)
As for the evenings, I've found that I really like reading and playing video games (LONELY MOUNTAIN: DOWNHILL and MY FRIEND PEDRO are glorious) and spending time with my wife. Watched her slip into her flowstate as she put ornaments on the Christmas tree last night while the dog-children sat around me and I trod my way through James's THE WINGS OF THE DOVE and I knew that there was nowhere else I'd rather be.
The challenge, then, is of the cessation of guilt for being myself, of taking charge of my day and making the day serve me and of refusing to rush, to kowtow, to live my life according to the whims of others – my stupid fucking immune-system-debauched pancreas included.
And so the day is, and so it shall be, probably. Newsletter 0080 drops tomorrow. Onward.
Worth a read: Pew Research Center's most striking findings of 2019.
Listening: SNUFMUMRIKO, by Snufmumriko.
