You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Here’s one filing system I used, back when dealing with piles of paper:
Haven’t quite figured out an alternative for online “piles” yet. Guess they’re “files” on the screen that’s erroneously called a “desktop.”
Last time I looked, my laptop was sitting on the real desktop.
And I’ve still been getting by without a printer.
Any ideas on how to keep those incoming emails and texts from getting lost in the clutter?
First off, I should explain that few old houses in New England actually have much by way of closets. So I’m actually talking today more about personal wardrobe and style.
One of my long-term planning notes was this, for my shift into retirement:
Focused look: new jeans (black/green/gray); sandals (fewer socks; also, they travel better); blazers for the pockets.
What actually emerged was quite different.
I shifted from denim jeans to tan cargo pants, for their pockets, especially.
Instead of my customary oxford shirts, I wore turtlenecks in winter, and Aloha shirts in summer. (I still largely avoid T-shirts.)
Instead of that blazer, I rely on a messenger bag to hold my reading glasses, cell phone, emergency cardiac prescription, choral music scores, and so on.
My style, such as it is, has emerged from yard sales, mostly. These days my focus is on wearing them till they give out while also downsizing. You’d be surprised how many compliments I get.
As I’ve been revisiting my earlier planning for retirement, I started to scold myself for not looking more carefully at finances. Then I remembered something I had anticipated but never noted: adding an overtime shift or two each month during my final five years of employment.
For years, management always seemed to have those openings, and the pay was good – time-and-a-half, often with a nighttime or weekend differential.
In the last five years, the kids would be on their own, for one thing. We would really build up our savings – by 25 to 50 percent, as I’m now calculating.
What happened instead was that the newspaper found itself increasingly financially strapped, to the point our pay was actually being cut. Officially, I was the copy desk chief, except that in the end there were no longer copy editors. They were all wearing other hats as positions consolidated. As for those overtime hours? We agreed to allow the hiring of part-timers.
So much for the big plan.
At least the stock market hadn’t crashed when my wife and I closed out our IRA to purchase the house in Maine.
Once again, another disturbing dream pushed me out of a restful sleep. It kept returning, with new twists.
It’s been nearly a decade since I last designed and paginated a newspaper page or faced its deadline pressure or even dealt with kinks in the paper’s latest computer system, but the game keeps popping up in my slumber – a game I’m also always on the verge of losing.
Why that and not, say, invading armies or insects or storms when it comes to anything verging on nightmares?
What are your repeated dreams?
One of my pre-retirement exercises involved trying to envision a routine that would help me meet my dreams – or at least some ambitious goals. It meant considering how many hours a day and week I would devote to each segment of my life – what percentage of my time I’d devote to Quaker, to literary pursuits, to being outdoors, and so on.
This is what I came up with, though I have to confess it’s far from where I wound up.
~*~
Putting it together on a daily clock led to this:
~*~
It was awfully regimented, even for someone used to “living on the clock,” as I had in the newsroom. Worse, it still didn’t fit everything in. I wondered about something more flexible, perhaps alternating a month of intense writing/revision with a month of other activity. Did I need to specify reading or rereading one novel and one other book each week? That sort of thing.
~*~
Arraying them over a full week led to this:
SUNDAY: Quaker, with visitation to other Meetings once a month. Family and friends in afternoon or visits to museums and galleries. Possibly an evening movie.
MONDAY: My normal disciplined schedule (see above).
TUESDAY: Normal disciplined schedule. Take the trash out.
WEDNESDAY: Option for travel, mountaineering, hiking, swimming, etc. (may actually float in the week, depending).
THURSDAY: Normal disciplined schedule.
FRIDAY: Normal disciplined schedule.
SATURDAY: A real weekend break, for a change. “Simmering” abed. Brunch. Opera broadcast. Weekend trips. A “date” night. Dance/concert/theater/party.
~*~
Let me repeat, that’s nothing like what actually emerged. If anything, I wound up spending too much time “up in my lair” at the keyboard, at least before moving to our new old house.
The new exercise, when I remember to apply it, has me waking up with a question: What do I WANT to do today?
Deciding I want to do certain chores or tasks, knowing how I’ll feel when they’re accomplished, is a much better approach, than performing them with a sense of duty or obligation.
Or I can decide I want to do something else more … and can put them off because I want to.
How do you decide to best spend your time? And suggestions for the rest of us?
After 50 years of keeping a journal, though more often of a weekly than daily regularity, I’ve passed the 200-volume mark. By now, most are hardbound, while others, especially early on, were of spiral-bound notebook nature or smaller size.
A few people in my past who admitted to trespassing into their contents were all disappointed. Guess they were expecting juicy details, though one was quite angry and accusatory. Look, mental health requires someplace to spew forth, and if a journal isn’t safe, corking up will only mean the feelings will fester.
Except that few of my entries articulate my emotions, feelings, or sensations. Yes, there were way too many of the hippie-era wow variety, but mine soon became a matter of tracking my ongoing activity. Just trying to remember what I did, who I met, what I saw filled the pages, when I could get to them.
Even so, they remain prompts into so much that happened at the time. And without them? There are no photos. Could that be why everybody is shooting like crazy with their cell phones?
The first newspaper editor who hired me, Glenn Thompson, urged me to keep a journal, though I didn’t get around to the practice until three years later, shortly after graduating from college. Still, I am everlastingly grateful. For the record, I was trying to puzzle together my “problem,” at least as it applied to the lack of a love life. Instead, it began noting the highs, even in the absence of a lover. And then began going from there.
Yes, I wish I had started earlier, there are so many details of my life I’ve forgotten and a trail from there would be deeply helpful in seeing how I eventually landed where I have.
Still, looking back, maybe mine aren’t journals, after all, but maps of my time, movements, and interests.
How do you keep track of where you’ve been?
I thought everyone did. And then one day, at the close of Quaker worship, I casually asked the circle if anyone in the room didn’t do such a checklist. I was surprised by the number of hands that went up, even if they were a distinct minority.
How do they get everything that needs to be done, done? It’s still a mystery to me. It’s like I need a map if I’m gonna get anywhere.
My wife and I have multiplicities of such lists. The problem is keeping them all straight. Sometimes, once we find where they’ve gone missing, just trying to read the handwriting is confounding, but even guessing still helps.
For years, I kept both seasonal and monthly lists, broken down into categories of Personal, Domestic, Creative, Quaker/Spiritual, and, at times, even Computer and Astro. I eventually kept a master file on my PC for easy updating and printed out pages as needed for a clipboard.
You know, reminders of auto tag renewal, driver’s license, income tax filing, ordering firewood (and the phone number), furnace and chimney cleaning, medical exam and dental cleanups, birthdays and anniversaries, Yearly Meeting sessions, drafting our local Meeting’s State of Society report, and so on.
To that I added goals like weekend escapes, writing and publishing agendas, gardening chores, home improvements, even exercise, which never did actually happen. Reviewing these can be embarrassing.
Yes, we can regiment ourselves or else try to go with the flow, even if that means trying to put out endless fires we hadn’t planned on. The frustrating part is all the stuff that never got done – or as I’m seeing in my review, did so only years later. Others remain unfulfilled dreams or promises.
The more practical solution has been my keeping of weekly planning calendars, though a master list would still help in inserting some of the tasks. This year, I’ve gone with a smaller book – make of that what you will. I do miss the big artwork, though.
It had to happen, especially after the euphoria of last summer. The return of Covid only intensified it, especially when family and friends came down with it. A letdown was inevitable. The summer people are gone, and Eastport nearly resembles a ghost town.
So here we are.
Cabin fever. The winter blues. The blahs. Even if I weren’t up here living alone, building new friends I can’t quite drop in on yet. Zoom meetings go only so far. Ditto the radio. At least choir practice is resuming, even if we’ll still be doing it online.
Further dampening my spirit was finding myself stuck on breaking through on the next steps for the book. I don’t want to take up new projects till I see this one over the next few hurdles. So I keep nipping away at the edges.
Some nasty weather had me not wanting to leave the house at all, sometimes several days in a row. If only the place weren’t so cold, indoors and out. (And the fuel oil bill comes as a shocker, as does the electrical. Just for me, mostly.)
By now, I’m getting tired of my own cooking. There aren’t a lot of options up here that are better, either. One night I headed down to the brewpub for a cup of zesty soup or an imaginative panini by our resident culinary angels, aka Bocephus, only to find they’ve departed to his relations in Spain for a month. Well, they’ve earned that part and just might return with a supply of smoked paprikia for my wife. Fingers crossed. Otherwise? A boxed Newman’s Own pizza from the IGA managed to suffice.
Obviously, I’m not the only one under this cloud.
The high school actually had a Cabin Fever Week before their winter break, and since I’d be up there anyway for that hour of indoor walking ‘round the gym, I thought I’d follow along.
The arts center’s Sunday afternoon free series has been a lifeline – if only we could all take off nearby for more.
By the way, I was wrong about the last of those near-zero overnight lows. We’ve had a few of them return, but on the heels of some highs in the 40s and 50s. The trick is to not believe spring is just around the corner, even if you see a robin hopping around on repeated days.
What’s getting you through the depth of winter?
Back when I lived in the ashram (see my novel, Yoga Bootcamp, for a taste of the experience), I was surrounded by fellow monastics attuned to astrology. They never quite converted me, even while they gave me a respect for looking at individuals and events from any number of archaic and unscientific perspectives. Sometimes their observations were uncanny. Besides, how else do we get down to allowing for gut instincts or intuition, which at times proves truer than rational thought?
Not to rule out fact-checking and logic thought, but surfaces can be misleading and data, incomplete or in error. I can assert that from some very personal experience.
~*~
In the bigger picture, there were times in my life when nothing seemed to be happening and, then, whammy, everything fell together. Searching for a new job, for example, or sending out poetry submissions and getting only rejection slips for weeks or months before any acceptances, which came in a cluster from five journals on the same day. That sort of thing, on the road in sales, too.
As for the love life?
Look to the stars, right?
Among my New Year’s practices I began sketching out the upcoming astrological outlook as part my annual goal setting. Typically, the forecasts offered words of encouragement or even cheerleading. We all need that.
Sometimes they were reminders to look higher or jolts against continuing mindlessly in a rut.
They also countered those seemingly nothing days when I felt I was merely going through the motions, reminders that much was out of my hands, that all I could do was keeping sending out submissions or resumes, for instance, and be in place and visible when the current shifted.
Perhaps most important was the inner dialogue these prompted.
~*~
As examples? Consider one day, releasing “pent-up tension in the weeks to follow. You’re ready to plunge ahead with a project that has been on the back burner for months, or to finally take a big step toward freedom. However, you may encounter resistance from a worried partner. Serious negotiations may be the only way you can settle your differences.”
Or another, that “suggests that a close colleague or friend can assist you with this process.”
Uh-huh. I’ll have to dig into my journals to see what, if anything, happened on those dates.
Sometimes they were encouragements to polish up my appearance and image and self-confidence. At other times, warnings of a “wave of change, with unpredictable Uranus and transformational Pluto upsetting the order that you seek.”
Sometimes, the words seemed appropriate:
“Although you may be progressive in your thinking, Aquarius is a fixed sign, and you don’t always handle change easily. Unfortunately, the more you seek security by grasping at the status quo, the more sudden and shocking the changes will be. Above all, remember that during these hectic times, flexibility is your friend.”
That, or maybe a good therapist.
~*~
I’m not so sure how accurate my journal entries would be, by the way, especially when they track relationships. Did that old flame reenter my life during a retrograde? Did my flirty side offer opportunities for my love light to shine for a whole year?
What did I really learn? Don’t hold your breath.
~*~
More intriguing, though, is the two-year stay of karmic Saturn in a position to bring me “increased professional responsibilities and demands I work harder than ever before. … You get what you deserve – and if you’ve defined your goals and worked hard to achieve them, this can be the big payoff.” Well, it was accompanied by three big trines to balance “your dreams of material success with common sense and persistence to bring your ideas into reality. … This can be the culmination of many years of striving toward professional goals, which are now within reach. If you fall short, however, you’ll need to make critical decisions about whether to continue along the same path.”
This turned out to span the time I took the buyout at the office, began releasing much of my pent-up material on my new blogs, followed by my novels as ebooks. Neither the blogs nor ebooks had really been on my horizon, even though one novel had been released as a PDF edition by a pioneering digital publisher.
~*~
Revisiting these notes does feel unsettling. The practice simply faded away years ago, perhaps along with my big dreams. Or perhaps I had simply had it with so much of the gibberish.
Whale watches, the ferry to and from Lubec, plus the Fourth of July, salmon, and pirate festivals were all fun. I even observed a beluga that lingered just offshore my first time out on the water here.
The island’s ten degrees cooler than the mainland in summer – I wore shorts only three times, all of them when I was off to run errands elsewhere. And supposedly the temps run ten degrees warmer in winter, though this house is still cold. We really do need to replace the windows and thoroughly insulate.
We missed gardening, apart from the little fenced-in patch in the front yard, but not the weeding, though the rabbits still happily devoured anything I brought in. Rather than squirrels as a menace, we have deer – especially when the wild apple tree starts bearing. They eat nearly everything in sight, including tomatoes, as I learned before reinforcing the rim of our little garden. Still, I nearly got a doe to eat a cookie from my hand one evening. My wife wasn’t so daring. And tomatoes? They really don’t grow well around here. But the oxeye daisies, basil, and lettuce continued merrily all summer.
None of the big renovations we’d anticipated got done. Contractors are booked out a year in advance, and the one we had lined up backed out before tackling the roof that our insurance company wants replaced pronto. Well, even if we had gotten started, prices on building supplies did more than double. We’re hoping they drop – soon.
Jnana's Red Barn 