Planning Perfect Days

I've got some time away from work and normally I'd take off for the airport and fly away to someplace strange and wonderful, perhaps explore a new place or visit friends who live far away. But these days of Corona have me being careful, and hesitant to fly. We hear that flying is safe, but there's something about being packed like sardines in a slender metal tube at 30,000 feet that gives me pause. Especially since so many of our fellow citizens feel like the whole thing is a hoax. If everyone were being especially careful I might feel differently, but it is what it is. 

Rather than fritter my days away, I've been thinking about what I might like to do if I were to have free time at home. See friends, read that stack of books, do projects around the house, write and engage other creative projects, day trips to places I'd like to visit. 

Mind you, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a perfect day. I am happy with near perfect, or with simply wondrous moments. So that's where I'm directing my energy. Yesterday I planned an afternoon with an old friend I haven't seen for a year. She has a magical back yard with a pool, hot tub, and a shady deck. She also lives near the ocean, so when I left her place I spent a few hours walking on the Ocean Grove-Asbury Park boardwalks and some time on a bench watching the ocean and sky. It was a beautiful day, so clear and cool. I took off as the sun was setting and swung around to the Bradley Beach bridge, overlooking the marina and a big sky full of changing color. That sky companioned me the whole way home. It was nearly a conversation, certainly a marvel. I thought to myself how we plant seeds for perfect days and are surprised by the beauty we're given.

Today I had lunch with a friend and spent the rest of the day writing. Tomorrow I'll have dinner with another friend in her enchanted garden. Monday I'll drive into the city and picnic with my son. I've got a couple of days in between with nothing on the calendar, because sometimes a nearly perfect day is simply spacious and unplanned.

Days of Accidental Beauty: 40 Days of Noticing is a daily writing practice dedicated to discovery. 

Co-Working Grace

I'm so glad I checked my email just now and discovered a co-working session in progress. I've been on the TCW platform, writing and responding to the creative efforts of others. And I popped back to something else because I did three hours of deep work and was ready to lighten things up a bit. The work I'm doing over there is excavation. I'm moving a lot of earth. I'd really like to balance it with some lighter writing. Deep work becomes heavy to carry without some lightness to balance it.

So I'm happy to have an excuse, or an opportunity, to come over here and lighten the load without having to figure out when I am going to do that on an otherwise full day. I've got a couple of weeks away from work so my days, these days, are all about writing. With some socially-distanced, outdoor adventures with friends thrown in for fun.

My library includes a book called The Notebooks of Leonardo DaVinci. The title and cover drew me from across the room in a small, used book store one day many years ago. Now that I'm immersed in creativity and craft, the book comes to mind. I'll see if I can excavate it from my shelves and piles and bins of books. Might be fun to take a walk through his process.

There are things about DaVinci that remind me of myself - endless curiosity, working in many areas, learning and discovery as a life path, creative mess. Sometimes I imagine myself in a large, cavernous space in a stone castle with views of a wide, open landscape uncluttered by human development. All the things I'm interested in and working on are out and open in the space around me. 

My tiny apartment does feel a little like that sometimes. When I look around and see papers and canvasses and sculpture and collage all over the place. Scraps of paper on the walls of my work spaces. Art wherever I can find a place to set it down or hang it up. Books. Ask me and I'll tell you my interior design style is creative mess. 

I think someone once called it eclectic.    

Photo: Mine, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. My daughter, an artist, in her studio.

Days of Accidental Beauty: 40 Days of Noticing is a daily writing practice dedicated to discovery.

I Should Be Doing Laundry

But, instead, I am doing anything but.

It sits in the basket in my hallway. Sheets. Towels. Dishtowels. I'm in trouble if I procrastinate until bedtime. All my sheets are in there.

When I traded my expensive apartment for my tiny, inexpensive apartment five years ago, one thing I gave up was a washer and dryer. I'm not sure that I would make that choice again. But I wanted to reduce my living expenses so I could write more and have money to travel and have less financial stress, so there it is. 

The thing is, there's no travel these days and there's a pandemic going on with contagion swirling around all over the place. I'm rethinking my priorities. Going to the laundromat feels a little more risky than it did when we took these kinds of things for granted. 

There's a lot we've taken for granted that we're rethinking these days. 

Days of Accidental Beauty: 40 Days of Noticing is a daily writing practice dedicaated to discovery. 

Before It Drives Me Crazy

I may be losing it. 

Checked my calendar today to make sure I didn't have something on there I'd forgotten and I noticed a mysterious notation. Three letters, presumably initials for something, in parentheses, in the upper right hand corner of eight squares in my calendar. Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday for the next two weeks, and Monday and Wednesday the following. It's written in orange Flair marker.

I have no idea what this is.

I played around with possibilities, but I think I need to do some kind of forensic remembering exercise, like I've seen on Criminal Minds. Close my eyes and put myself in a meditative state to try to quiet myself and remember the day and time and frame of mind when I wrote this in my calendar. Ask myself questions to jog my memory and help me to access this one.

A friend laughed and said that she hopes I figure it out before it drives me crazy. 

Allostatic overload is real. I credit this to too much in my head and an inability to figure out how to take care of myself during these times. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. I've seen lots of people I know who are having recall issues. 

It simply reminds me that I need to renew my efforts around nutrition, movement, hydration, meditation, and sleep. This stuff is not rocket science. But it's so much easier to overwork to get things done and avoid the headaches of not getting everything done than it is to set boundaries that might annoy people. I've got enough stress right now without the added stress of annoyed people in my sphere. I suppose it's about what kind of stress is the least difficult for a person. 

An image comes to mind, Dr. Strange manipulating time energy. It took him awhile to figure out how to do that well in his changed reality. But he did. Figure it out. 

Days of Accidental Beauty: 40 Days of Noticing is a daily writing practice dedicated to discovery 

Surfacing

I know. I know. I disappeared on you. But I did not disappear. I simply have gone underground and will come up someplace else. Here's what I've done

I signed up for The Creative's Workshop, offered by Seth Godin and Akimbo. I really like his work. Last year I signed up to do The Podcasting Fellowship and I became overwhelmed by the tech and disappeared. I crashed and burned. It's not like me to just stop and disappear. Or maybe it is. I don't know. That's a hard thing to think about related to oneself. So I may think about it or I may let it lie and if it comes up again, I'll deal with it. Or I won't. We have choices about that kind of stuff and need to balance our inner growth with our peace of mind. Intense times of inner growth are challenging.

And that's where I am right now. In an intense time of inner growth. Of expansion. Of showing up every day and working on my craft and of giving and getting feedback. It's amazing. 

I've fallen into some creative work that's been lying fallow somewhere in my psyche. I'm not talking about it in the outside world yet because it it alchemizing. But I'm doing it and that's the exciting thing. I'm excited, and I haven't been excited for a long time, except for that time a few weeks ago that I took off for the beach. Or saw my mom for the first time since the Corona lockdown. Or saw my son. Or my friend Sarah. Or had the first Zoom Happy Hours with my kids and with the women I went to high school with as girls.

But I haven't been excited about my creative work since the days before we realized we'd need to cancel the concert on March 20. If we'd scheduled it a week or two earlier we could have had it. I started this blog series to get excited about my creative work again and it has felt instead like, well I don't know what, but it hasn't felt good. Or I haven't felt good about what I have been putting out. I did feel good about showing up, until the hurricane hit and broke my streak. But now I'm showing up every day for my craft and I am writing beautiful work that I am happy with and that people are asking to be notified about so they can read it. That feels like a gift.

I am not sure I will continue the 40 days of this writing practice. I will probably pop over when I have energy and something to say. But, also, I do not want to dilute my process. I've fallen off the face of the earth and am discovering the underside, and everything is fluid.

Days of Accidental Beauty: 40 Days of Noticing is a daily writing practice that invites discovery.  

The Thing Is

On the road again and typing one-fingered on my phone. The new format promised an improved experience, especially for mobile users, and I must (grudgingly) admit it is better. Still, I’ll appreciate the return to my laptop tomorrow when I’m home. 

It’s not often that I apply the word “curmudgeon” to myself, but here I am. It’s the second time I’m using it in about a week. About myself. 

The thing is - I find tech challenging. The more I learn, the more I discover how much I don’t know.

Days of Accidental Beauty: 40 Days of Noticing is a daily writing practice that invites discovery.

Balancing the Scales

I woke up this morning to a friend's FB post around impermanence. Her entire website has been lost. It just disappeared. She misses her daughter. They live on different continents during Corona time. It feels strangely resonant with yesterday's writing, and even last year's writing when I was ghosted by Google. 

Erasure. Separation. Isolation. All of it takes us back to grief. When grief is up, it will not let us go.  

A good friend and I have been trying to get together safely the last month. We began this endeavor when it looked like things with the virus were easing. Our plan - to meet at a place between where we both live and to have a long and leisurely lunch outside on the deck of a restaurant that overlooks the Susquehanna River. We've been meeting there for years and have never had a problem. We usually eat outside there anyway, just because it is beautiful. This, actually, might even feel somewhat normal.

Except for the storms. Every date we've set has been beset with storms. Like this morning. I received a text from her at 7:32 today -

It's raining here, can we check in before driving? The weather may not be conducive to sitting outside during lunch -

I replied -

Sure.

And sent a screen shot of the weather with a comment.

Yeesh. The weather. Woke up to thunder here.

At about 9:15 another message -

I'm thinking it's a wash today. Can you chat, just to have a little time?

That's the loss, isn't it? The time. The presence. The chance to let down and talk. And a glimpse of normalcy. We haven't seen each other since this all began, and I think it might have been longer even than that. I think this issue with blocks to meeting may have been going on for quite awhile, or in the fall we may have been able to meet one time after a previous long stint of scheduling blocks and snow events. 

The previous long stretch of time with blocks to meeting did not bother me so much. Back then, it never occurred to me that there might be a day when meeting might be impossible or improbable. Seeing a friend is something I've always taken for granted.

And even though I am moving down the spiral exploring grief this morning, my surface response to these things is not to worry about it. To set another date and to do something surprising with this unexpected time that has opened up. 

There's a balance that's important to find these days. It's a new balance. A re-calibration. A reset. We are learning to walk on new and shifting ground.

Days of Accidental Beauty: 40 Days of Noticing is a daily writing practice that invites discovery.