We got in about midnight on Saturday from a trip that began in Los Angeles, jumped to San Francisco, then to Sydney and finally ended in Christchurch, New Zealand after what seemed like days of traveling. Indeed, it’s hard to work out just how long you have been traveling when there are International Date Lines and so many time zone changes in play.
Sunday, we got up and spent much of the day unpacking until about 3 PM when I suggested that we go out for a ride in the nice summer weather.
I came back from that ride fairly depressed. Partly because I’m at the end of a long and idyllic vacation and seeing all my American friends and family. But, in a large measure too because of Christchurch.
Your author - 2011
My beautiful city on the Southern Island of New Zealand is still a deeply wounded entity. As we drove around, the city center is still predominately an upsetting scene of destruction and demolition. Wounds that will likely take five years, and more likely 10, to begin to get sorted out so that it regains some of what made it so very special.
So, I was back and feeling sad and twisted by all of this. Part of me wants to pull up stakes and move on to a place not so wounded. And another very considerable part of me knows that Colette would probably not opt to leave this city that’s been her home for 30 years. It’s one of those quandaries you just have to look at and live with until it resolves one way or the other. But, it left me unsettled and when we returned to the house, I had a good long lie down on the couch and just let the feelings wash over me.
I’m never one to be down long, though. Monday morning, I was up and away to work to see what lay in store for me there. All of that is yet another quandary for me.
They treat me very well and the job’s provided me with a good income these last 18 months or so. But, maintaining old and cranky software that’s been agglutinating for years has never been a favorite of mine. So, do I go or do I stay? Security and a regular paycheck sit on one hand. And, the on the other hand, sit freedom to write my own software and take a shot at entrepreneurship with all the economic and emotional risks that go with that. And in the back of my mind, a small voice that says, “If not now, when?”
Not knowing yet what I really want, I went into work Monday thinking, “I’ll wait and see what new thing they offer me to do. If it’s something I’d really find interesting to do, then I’ll take serious look. But if it’s more spaghetti wrestling and digging through messes that should never have been coded that way, then I’m going to take a flyer.” That was Monday and today’s Wednesday and I’m still thinking about it all. ‘Waiting is’.
In Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein introduces this concept: “Waiting is”. (http://jassnight.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/waiting-is/)
To me, it means patiently waiting, with no time frame in mind, until the decision simply makes itself because all the necessary parts needed to make the decision, have arrived. And, when they are there, the decision virtually makes itself. Even though we think we are the agent of decision, we are in fact, simply the vessel within which the decision assembles and makes itself.
Little is to be gained by forcing decisions.
A good friend of mine, who said she much enjoyed the personal side of what I’ve been writing these last two months, suggested, that as I go forward and resume with my normal fare, that I might leaven it with more of the personal and not such a steady diet of renditions of all that is so badly broken in our world.
After thinking about what she said, I agree and I am going to try to do more of that.
In truth, I deeply value being able to look squarely at the world and the mess that it’s in. But, being such a ‘looker’ is not all that I am. I’m a poet, a lover, a good friend to many people, a father and a grandfather and someone who, in spite of several scars and setbacks, deeply likes myself and my life and I think that I am one of the luckiest and most blessed people I know. And, each morning, when I get up, I feel deep thankfulness that I am still here with my heart, my mind and my body mostly intact. And thus, I rise to love the day intensely.
Somehow, I can keep the doom and gloom of the “Perfect Storm” hypothesis, which I believe now is more on the money that ever, separate from my joy and my love of life and love for those around me.
Perhaps, what Katy was telling me, is to share more of both sides of that. And she’s right and I will. I hope it pleases you, dear readers.
dennis
I understand you. I, too, see the world as it is, beautiful and broken and good an so evil, but yet I am grateful and peaceful to be here. The world has always been this way, Dennis. Wars, natural disasters, destruction, greed, corruption, it’s no more no less than it’s been. And now we know everything, it is somtimes difficult to know so much. It’s differerent, the dangers are bigger, but so are our lives; we have rich lives. Every coin has a back side.
As for me, it’s a difficult life I have had and still have, it seems the challenges never stop being thrown at me but we all have our crosses to bear. Some are bigger than others. Some of us have more strenght than others. Yet I am privileged to live this life and to be in this little corner of the world; After all I could have been born in rural India, or in a war torn country somewhere.
as a footnote, when I come back from one the months long trips I used to take I was always depressed for a while. It is hard to get back to routine when everything has been so enchanting. Perfectly normal.
Do what you must. Chose carefully.
Love. Lise