Day 1 and Changing Mindsets
Monday is usually my Sunday, so it hasn’t hit me yet. Tomorrow, I would have driven to work. Although it would have been nearing the end, the day would have felt normal. The routine comforted me in its consistency, while the apprehension of an end remained distant, like the expectation of a full moon, or the onset of spring. Inevitably, there was an end, and it would be unfamiliar. When it came, like a microburst lifting buildings from their foundations, we adapted. I swallowed a new reality and it numbed my insides.
Today is Tuesday, and it is my firsday unemployed. I crave being occupied, but not in the employer sense of occupation. My struggle with being present can be explained with a visual concept of time that the Aymara people of South America utilize. In their visualization of their world, as time passes, we create memories of the past, and yet the future remains dark. The movement of bodies through time in the Aymara visualization is backwards, with the future behind us, and the past vivid in front, fading from view as we continue backwards into the future.
When I used to imagine my self in time, there is the sprawling epic of my past behind me, and in front is an empty path, and an open future, which clears of fog as I approach and fill it with new memories. And today it occurs to me that this visualization is as asinine as it is narcissistic. The better image would be Times Square, where I shoulder check my way through a world that carries on with or without me, where my path is only there if I walk it. Not that a busy tourist attraction is relevant to my choice of path in life. The point is that the Aymara have invented a palpable perspective on our life through the lens of time. Because the open road cliché is entirely disappointing, which brings me to my current test of presentness.
For me to be present, to be undistracted by future plans, comfortable in current circumstances, and rapt in the moment of my surroundings, I must be able to take a long lunch. Simple as that. The opportunity to gab on with friends or keep on reading a book, to enjoy another round or course or both and linger, luxuriously in that afternoon, would be taken if I were present. Which is why my test is clueing me in to what is wrong with my lifestyle that has prevented so many long lunches (the exception most recently being The Parish Café on Boylston with Kristen last summer): too much. If I took my next week and queued up all my plans (and remember that I am unemployed as of today) so that they filled the path I was walking backwards on, I would bump into people and places and obligations so often that I would have to slow down (another lesson that should be learned) and step carefully so that each plan is a welcome addition, and in between I can enjoy the gap.
So let’s recap: we are all walking backwards into the future, which appears before us as we enter it, which is not blank or waiting to be filled by our internal locus of control and imagination, but a symphony of billions of players seeking their own long lunches. When I imagine a mood or mindset that settles me in to the moment and sits down for that lunch, it must be surrounded by fewer plans and expectations, so that there is room to linger, and not so many tourists to shoulder check my way through.
Today is Tuesday, and it is my firsday unemployed. I crave being occupied, but not in the employer sense of occupation. My struggle with being present can be explained with a visual concept of time that the Aymara people of South America utilize. In their visualization of their world, as time passes, we create memories of the past, and yet the future remains dark. The movement of bodies through time in the Aymara visualization is backwards, with the future behind us, and the past vivid in front, fading from view as we continue backwards into the future.
When I used to imagine my self in time, there is the sprawling epic of my past behind me, and in front is an empty path, and an open future, which clears of fog as I approach and fill it with new memories. And today it occurs to me that this visualization is as asinine as it is narcissistic. The better image would be Times Square, where I shoulder check my way through a world that carries on with or without me, where my path is only there if I walk it. Not that a busy tourist attraction is relevant to my choice of path in life. The point is that the Aymara have invented a palpable perspective on our life through the lens of time. Because the open road cliché is entirely disappointing, which brings me to my current test of presentness.
For me to be present, to be undistracted by future plans, comfortable in current circumstances, and rapt in the moment of my surroundings, I must be able to take a long lunch. Simple as that. The opportunity to gab on with friends or keep on reading a book, to enjoy another round or course or both and linger, luxuriously in that afternoon, would be taken if I were present. Which is why my test is clueing me in to what is wrong with my lifestyle that has prevented so many long lunches (the exception most recently being The Parish Café on Boylston with Kristen last summer): too much. If I took my next week and queued up all my plans (and remember that I am unemployed as of today) so that they filled the path I was walking backwards on, I would bump into people and places and obligations so often that I would have to slow down (another lesson that should be learned) and step carefully so that each plan is a welcome addition, and in between I can enjoy the gap.
So let’s recap: we are all walking backwards into the future, which appears before us as we enter it, which is not blank or waiting to be filled by our internal locus of control and imagination, but a symphony of billions of players seeking their own long lunches. When I imagine a mood or mindset that settles me in to the moment and sits down for that lunch, it must be surrounded by fewer plans and expectations, so that there is room to linger, and not so many tourists to shoulder check my way through.
posted by Sara Haxby at
3:05 PM
