You may or may not know, but the aisles of a grocery store have always been treacherous places for me. Maybe it stems from my childhood Speak-and-Spell commanding in its stentorian voice:
"Spell 'isle,' meaning island."
and ever since the homophone clicked into place, I took to feeling marooned in a sea of unintelligible packaging and adverts. I'm sure I inherited a genetic discomfort with shopping in general, and these two predispositions sometimes chemically cohere into a cement that prevents me from moving a mental muscle. Then folks will politely -- Excuse me. Oh, sorry. -- edge past me to make their milk selections, as I stand at the doors fogging up the glass peering to compare prices-per-unit, expiration dates and locations where my dairy items were Manufactured Proudly.
I'm not-so-good with the little decisions, you see.
Similarly, a Day Off is a day full of possibilities. Lately they have felt extraordinarily overfull. Do I spend the day relaxing in my yard reading and doing blissfully nothing? Do I reorganize the kitchen so I can finally reach my food on the top shelf? Do I sit down with some markers and a journal and make some art? Do I blog, write a postcard or two, do my laundry, work on my interp. program, go hiking, watch The X-Files with my housemates, bake cookies, futz around on the internets, take an online class, run errands, figure out what and where I want to be when I grow up? Do I eat dinner??
So far, most of the answers to that bourgiest of dilemmas have been NOs (except, resoundingly, for the last. I have come to love and live for my meals). You see, I went to Arizona because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. However, living in the bright white sun hasn't made an angel of me yet, and I'm no transparent eye-ball. I still don't floss or make my bed; I'm not up at dawn saluting the sun with my down-dog. I don't bake my own bread, or harvest local ingredients for my meals. I put clothes back in the drawers that I deem "mostly clean." There aren't enough hours in the day (even here, where Daylight Savings is a myth and a rumor) to fit in all the stuff I want to do, yet still enough hours to for the stuff I wish I could have left behind to sneak in the cracks.
I understand that I am the worst of complainers, splitting hairs that El Dorado is really more of a bronzey color than a gold, now that I really look at it up close. I don't actually remember what kind of illusions I had before coming out here - cactus-filled visions, certainly, and sun, and ranger hats - but I never looked into the futurevoid and saw myself doing anything like grocery shopping, or waiting in an uncomfortable chair to get my flu shot. Or wasting a day sitting on the couch. Regular things. Daily grind things. Though I may not write too much about them, those are happening too.
I'm unsure whether one can live the entirety of one's life having the peak experiences I've been highlighting here. My first instinct would be to say no, of course not. You need to have moments of mundane preparation before you can be physically or logistically ready for the joy of wild abandon. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single... afternoon of clicking around on the internet to get the best deals on plane tickets.
But on the other hand. I feel like I've gotten Icarian-close to finding some kind of meaning, lesson, amusement in even the more tedious of tasks, as long as I grade them on this learning curve I am currently on. I mean, when I weigh options like 'create art vs. explore the outdoors' or 'hang out with friends vs. learn some science' and become paralyzed at the crossroads because this is the minutiae of my life! How privileged am I!
Anyway. Gone to climb another mountain.
BRB.
