A Good Life's Day

I distinctly remember, during my first great self-improvement kick when I was (officially) unemployed (officially unemployed = the government sent me checks), catching myself one day thinking that I didn’t have enough time to do all the things I wanted, but that one day (when some nameable or unnameable thing or series of things, happened) I would.  Then I realized I was unemployed, I had essentially no external responsibilities; that, in fact, I would never have more time than I did at that moment, in that day, in that group of days.  What was it that I lacked time to do?  I don’t remember exactly, but as it was during one of my self-improvement kicks, it was something along the lines of learning a language, reading the collected works of Shakespeare, engaging in some kind of exercise regimen, or starting to eat healthier.  Something good for me.

When I am in the grip of a self-improvement kick, what happens is I add blocks of time to my schedule, piling them up one on top of another like legos, until—inevitably—a day can no longer support the edifice I have constructed.  Then entropy takes hold, sometimes violently—the whole thing topples—but more often slowly—blocks are removed outright or put off until tomorrow for so long that the urgency to do the thing is lost and eventually forgotten.  It is amidst these cycles made up of peaks of organization and troughs of entropy that I navigate through my life.  My moods often lag behind where you would expect them—it is often at the very lowest of my moods that I begin to organize my life (sick of moping, of being unproductive, or simply needing something to make the decision of what I should do when there is absolutely nothing I want to do) and often when I am happiest and most productive that I start to disregard the organization and let my life slip toward… not chaos, I don’t think, but impulse (if I am happy and productive, I trust myself to allow my feelings choose my activity).  Eventually, either the lack of structure leads to a change in mood, or maybe the melancholy returns because it is time for the melancholy to return.

The melancholy has been here of late. 

A passage I read this morning in Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life has had me thinking.  Here it is:

There are no shortage of good days.  It is good lives that are hard to come by.  A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough.  The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more.  The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.  Who would call a day spent reading a good day?  But a life spent reading—that is a good life.  A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one.  But who would not call Pasteur’s life a good one, or Thomas Mann’s?

This is a loaded passage, and I won’t go into all of it, but I think it nicely captures a good part of what I’m feeling here in Buenos Aires.  On the one hand, I’m writing every day and napping every day (two signs I am living a good life); on the other hand, I feel as if I am missing out on precious opportunities, missing out on too many good days.  What those opportunities are, I’m not even sure—which is of course part of the problem.  But I feel as if there is, if not an answer, then at least a nice summation of the dilemma in this passage.  And, as happens more often than seems fair, I came across it just when I needed it.

Finding balance will always be a challenge, and even writing it that way is an untruth.  Balance is not something found (as in, now I have it), but something constantly being adjusted.  Every day has its own opportunities and every life has its own needs.  My needs tend more toward what Annie Dillard calls the life of the spirit—I want my time to spread out before me like an open field.  I want to luxuriate in my life without ever rushing or feeling as if there is anywhere else I ought to be.  Of course, that’s impossible.  Because of course, I am greedy, and I also want those sensations—beauty, awe, excitement, culture, companionship.  But they do require more and more and that is what I’m fighting now—this voice telling me every moment I’m not out in the city, at a museum or tango performance, exploring the countryside, is a moment I’m wasting.  And this voice has a place, in fighting the inertia I’m prone to, and it has a danger, in preventing me from doing the work I want to do every day, no matter where I am.

So I will study my Spanish now, though I do not enjoy studying Spanish, because I will enjoy knowing Spanish, and have already enjoyed the fruits of knowing some Spanish.  And then I will go out into the city, and if the day is as nice as it seems, and if the spirit calls me, I will read in the sun, on a gentle slope in the park near my apartment.  And yesterday in the same place, there was a woman who had tied a long piece of red fabric to a branch so that the fabric hung down, so she could practice some sort of acrobatics on it, climbing up the fabric, rolling herself in it, suspending herself at strange angles.  I hope she will be there again.  And I hope it will be a good day.