Not at ease

I know, I know … you hear this from me a lot.  But it’s my blog, so I’m going to make a note here … to record this for some day, or to make myself write, or for some reason unknown.

 

I’ve realized that I just don’t feel at ease these days.  I don’t know why.  But one consequence is that I’m eating more, and I seem to be losing notches on my belt at an astonishing rate.  And drinking in the evenings: not much – two glasses of wine can put me away these days – but regularly.  From a health point of view that shouldn’t be a problem – two glasses of wine is supposed to be recommended for middle-aged men, I think.  But it encourages the eating.  And when I sit in Sangha, like tonight, it makes me wonder why?  Am I covering something up with the eating and drinking?  Am I running away from some discomfort … some suffering?  Isn’t it supposed to be better to be mindfully aware of my suffering so that it magically changes into a butterfly, or something like that?

 

Well, without it I feel like I feel right now.  Not at ease.  Just a little bit anxious or tense.  Not very much – and in fact once I’m done typing this I plan to go to bed and I bet I’ll fall asleep just fine.  But why?  What am I discontent at?

 

I feel like I should be doing something.  But I don’t know what.  If I’m not writing I often feel like I should be writing.  But it’s not like I use this space as a writer’s journal, to polish my style into beautiful, lapidary fiction.  It’s more like a stream-of-consciousness transcript, the sort of thing that provoked Truman Capote’s acid critique of Kerouac: “That’s not writing – it’s typing.”  Yeah, well mine too.

 

Or I feel like I should be doing something to make my life better … maybe reading some of those books on my shelf I’ve never gotten to yet.  Which one today?  Don’t know.  What do I want to change about my life?  Don’t know.  Besides, isn’t changing your life a lot of work?

 

Actually, in principle it shouldn’t have to be.  There’s a Japanese concept called kaizen, adopted by a lot of companies as a continuous-improvement philosophy.  The idea is that if you know where you want to get to, you take tiny, incremental steps towards your goal, but you do it every day.  Make the steps small enough to be easy, but keep at it.  And in time, dripping water wears away rock.

 

It’s a great idea.  Of course it requires constant attention (deep sigh).  And it also requires knowing where you want to go.

 

Maybe I can start making a list of things I want more of (or less of) in my life.  Of course as soon as I sign off and post this I’ll think of something I missed.  And I’ll probably decide in any event that some of the things on the list have to go, to be replaced by their opposites.  But what happens if I just start listing the first things that come into my head?

 

More interesting and meaningful work

 

More friends

 

More travel

 

More walking

 

Less eating

 

More cooking (oops! I see a conflict already!)

 

Less clutter (actually my day-to-day space is pretty clutter-free, but there are boxes of stuff in storage that should probably all be burned if only I knew what it was)

 

More self-understanding …  I mean, a better understanding of what I want and where I want to be going (but isn’t that what this list is all about?)

 

Do I really even want to write?  Well … I enjoy figuring things out, and writing helps me do that.  I enjoy creating something masterful, that speaks to people: 99% of what I write is just blather, but there have been a few pieces over the years that have been better than that.  Would I want to write for a living?  If I had to write for a living, I’d probably look for any excuse to do anything else at all.  It’s like Mark Twain observed: “Work is what a body is obliged to do, while play is what a body is not obliged to do.”  Robert Benchley once formulated exactly the same principle in slightly different words, pointing out that “A human being is capable of doing any amount of work there is to be done, provided that it is not the work he is supposed to be doing at that precise moment.”

 

How did I start talking so much about work?  Oh right, … writing ….

 

There are other points where I want flatly opposite things, depending on where I’ve been most recently or what I’ve been reading.  When I read Thich Nhat Hanh, I want to drink less.  (Also when I wake up with a hangover, but that’s really really rare these days, because – as noted – even when I do drink it’s nothing like five years ago.)  When I thumb through my Mediterranean cookbook or anything by Florence King, I want to drink more: only good stuff, and only in the right way, but still.  (The cookbook inclines me towards wine as a basic food group in the Mediterranean diet; Florence King’s lunatic evocations of The South incline me towards bonded bourbon.)  Maybe I should avoid the whole dilemma by just reading less.

__________

 

Oh hell, it’s high time for bed.  Staying up writing this means that my stomach is starting to growl.  And there is that open half-empty bottle of Shiraz in the refrigerator ....

 

Good night.