Unwinding

11:50

Trying VERY VERY HARD TO BE RELAXED.  And that’s just about how successful I am, stretched between the anxieties and anxiety management styles of two very different families.

At least I know the right words and the right mindset.  The right words are: I release all my specific desires about where to go and what to do while showing my in-laws the really lovely and cool town I grew up in, which has only gotten cooler in the decades since I left.  I certainly release my desires to go to new places and new parts of town that were not on middle-class-white-people map when I lived here, but are now interesting and desirable.  I release my desire to approach this city as an urbanist, and explore the exciting new mixed income, mixed use redevelopment project (to be fair, I could not do that with just Milo & Daniel).  I release my desire to go to the excellent makeup store, at least today.  I release my desire TO GET THE HELL OUT OF THE HOUSE BEFORE 1PM.  That is a sticky desire, or a desire that likes to play fetch.  Or maybe I’m the one playing fetch, and the desire is the stick, and I don’t truly want to release the desire, I want to chase it and bring it back again and again and again.  Who is the dog?

Anyway, it’s good to know what the aspiration is, even though the tension in my shoulders and neck remind me that it is very far away.

About all those books I brought — books, I could in fact be reading right now, books that could lower my shoulders to my elbows, that could make the time pass so that I didn’t notice the whole lovely morning disappearing forever, while my in-laws sleep late, shower, putter, get breakfast (AT NOON! What are they college students? Oh, wait, two of the three of them are), and act like they are on vacation or something, rather than participants in Dorothea’s tour of wonder and delight.

Anyway, I brought a lot of books. And so far, I’m only about 1/3 of the way through one of the Louise Penny novels.  I read work material on the plane, which was satisfying. It’s interesting stuff, and I liked to see myself continuing to work and be curious. The biggest gift of the last two years at work (and I can’t believe it’s been two years) is the full throttle restoration of creativity and curiosity.  I don’t ever recall being this curious before.  So that’s several hours’ reading diverted elsewhere.

And on Shabbat, which is normally maximum reading time, I did something I almost never do, which is… hang out and do what the people around me were doing, which was… hanging out, mostly.  I looked at magazines.  We watched a lot of West Wing and Die Hard, which apparently is a Christmas movie (here is where I remind you that, although we are on the stricter side of observance on many things, we do watch TV and DVDs on Shabbat.  We don’t use computers or iThings on Shabbat, and we are iffy about radio & CDs.  Radio if our beloved local baseball team is playing and I’m cooking dinner.  But not CDs unless Daniel puts one on when we clean up.  We are not models of consistency or right behavior.)

This morning I worked for a couple of hours, and that, too, felt good.  I chose to, even though it meant missing out on a great yoga class (like all cool North American cities, my hometown has great yoga. Also local kombucha).  I felt like a leader.  Perhaps this is just the bare minimum of responsibility, rather than extraordinary leadership.  Either way, I like being drawn back into my work because it’s extremely satisfying.  Even the administrative problem I was working on is a good exercise in solving these kinds of problems.  So I should be grateful to my indolent in-laws for sleeping while I was examining a budget spreadsheet, since there was no stress about getting out of the house at, say 10am. And I did yoga in my parents’ backyard, with a nice breeze, and it was a good sequence.  Yoga Journal is really iffy these days, but the May 2016 issue is first rate.

The writing is doing what I needed it to do, which is to remind me that I am steering my own little fate today, and doing things that satisfy me.  It is half-fulling me.  But if we are still here at 1pm (and of course we will be)… if we are still here at 1:30, I might need to re-full.

12:15