Work in Progress

At times like this, when I’m not sure exactly what I want or where I’m headed, I find it’s best for me not to force it.  To wait it out, and, while I’m waiting, to go back to the basics.  Try to sort out “who I am,” or, in other words, what my most basic values are now.  This is one of the many reasons "the List" has been so important in my life.  In addition to being a tangible reminder of the things that are important to me, it is, when all else fails, a damn good distraction.  At any given time, I can put myself to work chipping away at one (or more) of the items.  And, if I’m paying attention, each attempt, big or small, successful or unsuccessful, teaches me something new.  It’s kind of like finding a puzzle piece that fits somewhere on the picture you’re trying to make.  It’s not always the piece you were looking for, but every bit helps.

  

The more eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that I put my list on the sidebar of this blog a few weeks ago.  I felt a little weird about it, because some of those items are a bit personal, but I figure you can’t expect to get what you want in life if you won’t even admit what that is. So there it is.  And hey, if you think you can help, let me know.   Anyway, right now I’m working on items 16, 55, and 74.

Number 55 isn’t easy, but it’s simple.  It doesn’t require much more of me than dedication and tolerance to pain.  Like most of life.  There’s only one way to accomplish it, and that is to go straight into it.  At least once every other day, I try to do as many push-ups as I can, and I try to do more than I did last time.  My progress? The number I can do with my knees on the ground has been going up relatively quickly, so I think any day now I’ll be able to do more than ½ of a “real” push-up.  Any day now.  And from there, 10 can’t be so far off.

Item 74 has been trickier than I thought it would be.  But only because I let it be.  I can bake, but I want to learn to cook. Specifically, I want to be able to cook at least 10 dishes well. I’ve already got enchiladas, and I more or less know my way around a lasagna, but with 8 dishes to go, I need some items in my repertoire that aren’t casseroles.  That said, I’ve concluded that I’m not much for complicated recipes and exotic ingredients.  I went through a phase where I wanted to make really impressive food, and it generally led to culinary disasters.  I thought I must be hopeless, so I decided to take advantage of the close proximity to my mother, grandmother and sister by getting recipes from them and then following them to the letter.  Well, guess what I’ve learned? It’s not about the recipes, exactly: they all make exceedingly delicious meals by, for the most part, keeping it simple.  They don’t need 30 types of seasoning when one or two will do just fine.  They don’t have to hunt for ingredients at special supermarkets.  I’m going to follow their lead, and see what happens.  Sometimes you’ve got to get out of your own way and stop complicating everything with grandiose plans.  That’s true of food, and it’s true of just about everything else.

Finally, my favorite: number 16.  I started playing the piano when I was 6 or 7 years old, when my parents bought me a Casio keyboard, which I’m pretty sure they could barely afford, and enrolled me in lessons at my school.  I spent long, agonizing, enchanted evenings poking at the keys in an effort to make “Kumbaya” come out.  And eventually, I did.  It felt like a miracle.  By the time I was about 12, I was agonizing over Bach and Beethoven.  But I decided that playing piano wasn’t as cool as hanging out with my friends.  So I quit.  I didn’t regret it right away, but for about 10 years now, I’ve wanted to find my way back.  The problem is that whenever I start again, I get discouraged.  I’m rusty now, my fingers aren’t as nimble as they used to be, and even reading music requires a lot more thought than I feel like it ought to.  And when I stumble over a simple song, I lose heart. 

At the time I quit, I had just begun learning Beethoven’s Fur Elise.  Now I want to finish.  Of course, what I really want is to start.  Start playing again, playing everything under the sun, not just that song.  But first I want to make it back to where I left off: Fur Elise.  I could’ve learned it relatively quickly fifteen years ago.  But now I’m going to have to work my way up to it.  I can play the first two sections.  I still haven’t managed to make my fingers move quickly enough for the third.  But when I sit down at my mom’s piano, I feel my world shrinking down to the notes, to my fingers, to the way the music feels, and I remember this piece of myself, a piece I let go when I first started to care what it meant to be “cool.”  A piece I’ve approached dozens of times since then, but walked away from each time because I wasn’t sure if I had what it took to do it anymore.  I’ve been playing every day here.  And it’s such a small thing, but it makes me deep-down happy.  One more little thing that makes me happy to add to my life, to the other little things.  One more puzzle piece in place.  When I get back to Poland, I’m going to find a practice space and keep working on it. 

Amateur Cartography

But I am not an explorer.  I haven't a single explorer on my planet.  It is not the geographer who goes out to count the towns, the rivers, the mountains, the seas, the oceans, and the deserts.

–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

This won’t come as a surprise if you've been paying attention, but I haven’t been feeling very positive about life lately.  I checked with a friend and the notion was seconded.  There has apparently been an observable decline in my optimism and cheerfulness in the past several months.  I could get into how it happened and what’s to blame for all of it, and I’d probably come up with some good answers, but knowing those things isn’t particularly helpful in this situation.  The questions I should really be asking are ‘what have I been doing that I need to stop doing?’ and ‘what things can I do that I haven’t been doing enough of?’

I’ve been going over and over this in my head for weeks, and I think there are probably a fair number of minor adjustments that could be made, but it hit me a few minutes ago that the major thing I’ve been doing in the last few months that I wasn’t doing before is that I’ve been thinking too far ahead, worrying about problems that haven’t arisen yet, and that may never arise.  Yes, it’s good to plan for the future, but when I had a wake-up call about how short life can be and I quit being a lawyer and decided to make some major changes, I also resolved not to do that anymore.  Not to get my head so tangled up in every possible thing that could go wrong years down the line that I never made any real decisions.  Not to put off my happiness until conditions were “favorable,” i.e., my life was exactly the way I’d envisioned it.  And I did quite well for a while.  But for one reason and another, I’ve somehow wandered back to the point where I am today, too concerned about where I’m going, not nearly concerned enough about where I am. 

It stops now.  I’m going back to being more in the present.  It’s true that I’ve realized this year that I may have gone too far with my “no tomorrow” theory, and that I can’t just drift along forever hoping I’ll stumble into a satisfying life.  This means that, yes, I still have some very real concerns about my present and about my future, and I need to sort those out.  But I’m going to come at them one at a time, as they relate to the life I’m living now, and not try to guess at every conceivable consequence of each action and try to figure out how to deal with those, too.  The best choices I’ve ever made have been the result of other actions I took.  They have not come from a process of bullying my brain into deciding something.  And the happiest times of my life have been those when I had goals I was aiming for, but not overly-specific road maps that I felt pressured to follow.  Because there are always surprises, always unforeseen obstacles or delays.  And the more I had my heart set on every detail going a certain way, the worse it felt when the world had other ideas for me.  So I’m going to have to let go of a few things that I’ve been trying too hard to control.  If I need to grip it so tightly, maybe it's not something I'm meant to have.  And who knows?  Perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised by what keeps floating around me once I've let go.  As my friend Elaine’s pappy says, “What’s for you won’t go past you!”*

Also, I’m going back to the list.  Look forward to a series of entries detailing how I’ve attempted (and succeeded at) crossing items off the epic list of things I want to do before I die.  Please hold me accountable.  If these entries don’t start appearing soon, do me a favor and ask me about the items.  And if I ask you for help with checking one off, do both of us a favor, and say yes.  I bet you won’t regret it.

*Thanks again for that gem, Elaine.