At 7:30, all the children are waiting at the corner bus stops. Some of them are with their parents and their dogs. I have to be mindful of this on my morning walks with Kimbrough. I want our walks to be peaceful, and our interruptions to be minor (stop to sniff some pee here, stare at a squirrel there) – as opposed to me yanking and tugging as he and another dog lunge and squirm and wriggle from across the street at each other. Fortunately, through a combination of training, patience, and avoidance – those scenes happen less and less often. Aside from the general embarrassment (sorry, my dog’s a jerk), I think the thing that bothers me about those outbursts are both the lack of control I feel and the suddenness of the interruption. As I get older, I’m starting to see the world in terms of flow and our constant (often internal) battle to have a say in where we place our attention.
Play
For the first time in what feels like forever, I woke up to my alarm, got up (despite not sleeping well), and worked on a new poem. My first thoughts when the alarm went off were about work and some emails I needed to send. I made coffee and sat down to read a few poems to nudge the work thoughts out of the way. In my reading, I came across the line “Growing up is learning to say things better.” The author describes how our worlds begin with shapes and colors and sounds as we piece together language and meaning. I was fascinated by this idea – how simple and complex it all is and how much we take for granted those earliest stages of learning. I was reminded of those early childhood drawings that many of us can recognize. The square house with the triangle roof. The mostly square windows divided into fours and sixes, the rectangle door and chimney with scribbles of smoke lifting into the air. Of course, this is a very middle-class, white, suburban landscape – all swing sets and sun in a nearly cloudless sky.
This drawing became the backdrop for the poem I was writing which ends with a couple, exhausted from a late-night argument, sitting at the kitchen table under the too dim yellow light, the drawing hangs on the fridge next to a math test with only one wrong answer (the daughter forgot to carry the one)… if only during their fight they could have paused and marveled at how the world, for their children, is a landscape of becoming and understanding – how in life there are wondrous concepts like borrowing and carrying over… that a one can also represent ten or a thousand, the sheer abundance of everything, that squares can be houses and windows… and that if growing up is learning to say things better, it’s important to actually try to say things better, more clearly, with simpler, less hurtful truths.
The task now will be to revise and narrow down (or completely blow up and expand) the poem – to hone. In that small phrase, I wanted to explore so many things (growing up, growing old, learning, unlearning, and all of the assumptions our experiences cement into our perceptions of the world)…. I wanted to see if children from other cultures drew similar drawings. I had neither the discipline nor the time to explore. Nevertheless, I felt good having written something, having imagined a scene in its different complexities. For a while, I found a state of flow.
Yesterday, Monday, I had set the alarm for the same time as today, with the same hope of getting up early and writing. When I talked with my friend at his book reading on Saturday, I asked him how he did it. How did he find the time to write and do family stuff and work a challenging job? He said he has to make the time. He gets up at 5 am every day and writes. For months I’ve been beating myself up over this because I know that’s what is required, but can’t seem to get there. Over the course of Sunday night through Monday morning I woke up four or five different times. I had heartburn and couldn’t get comfortable. I dreaded getting up and starting the week and was getting upset that I was so tired but couldn’t sleep – a type of tired that’s almost too painful or frustrating to go back to sleep. When the alarm went off at 5:05, I had an “oh, hell no” moment. I slept for another hour, but was feeling far from rested. I blame not writing (or exercising) on exhaustion and then slowly acknowledge that being tired is only one of the problems.
Work
There’s a tab open in my browser “4 Insights on Why You Don’t Want to Go to Work.” That was the mood I was in Monday morning after a terrible night of sleep. Because I seem to sleep so poorly on Sunday nights, I was assuming that I was suffering from some existential dread related to another week of work. To be clear, it’s not the job itself – though there are a lot of demands, many of them self-imposed… No, Monday morning, I was struggling with the concept of work… this thing that consumes at least 40 hours of our week for 40 or 50 years of our life. If we add in all of the time we spend going to and from work and talking with friends and family about work and ruminating silently over work, it takes up over a third of our adult life. In the end, what can we really say about it? How does it compare to feeling the fullness of spending time with friends and family or the comfort and exhilaration of being in love? For most of us, work will have been what we did to make some money to live our lives. In the end, if you’re lucky (and I’m not sure that’s even the right word for it) you found some meaning in the work you did, it fulfilled some need or provided a creative outlet or helped more clearly define your place in the world.
I’ve been debating with the 4 insights article since Monday. Most of my issues with it are in its basic assumption that work is inextricably tied to life, and the author’s subsequent logic that life outside of work needs to be managed in order to make work more tolerable, if not pleasurable. She posits, “The thing about life is that we have to work to live.” Which, while true for most of us, isn’t true for everyone and as a blanket statement about existence (and dare I say meaning), seems kind of absurd. What does it mean to live? And if work is seen as the means to an end, then it feels like a shifty middle man who is all too happy to exchange money for time knowing full well that we need both to enjoy a full life.
From her premise that we have to work to live, the author continues with similar unquestioned “truisms.” As I read, I found myself wanting to flip her assumptions around. “It is a well-known fact in HR that employees’ personal lives can impact job performance.” Perhaps she could also suggest that a person’s employment might have a negative impact on a their personal life (and yes, I’d rather talk about people and not employees – the framing here seems important). She continues, “When you don’t have energy, in general, your motivation will suffer. Your health is vital to performance on the job — and enjoyment.” Or maybe… your health is vital to… you know… your health. Stress, often a result from work, is linked to high blood pressure, heart attacks, depression, and countless other ailments.
At this point, I was starting to think the author was just a shill for “the man” – that her underlying argument was that we need to live to work. But, I didn’t find disagreement with everything she had to say. She later cites, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety in which that author suggests quality of experience (in work and leisure) is tied to finding a state of flow which he defines as “a state of peak enjoyment, energetic focus, and creative concentration experienced by people engaged in adult play, which has become the basis of a highly creative approach to living.”
The success of the article was to make me think about what I like least about work. As I did so, it became clear that maybe I was struggling to find flow. I dread the never ending, ever-growing to-do list and my lack of progress. I seldom have the time, tools, or attention to sit and work on one thing, start to finish. It feels that quite often, as I’m working on one thing, a more pressing thing comes up, or I hit a roadblock that requires information that I don’t have… More importantly, quite a few of the things I need to do require “thinking through” ideas and concepts which on most days feels nearly impossible. These are the things that I think about the moment I wake up, and because it feels as though my mind seldom gets to rest or take comfort in crossing something off the list, I feel like I’m in a perpetual state of exhaustion – that my attention is fragmented in a dozen different directions.
Flow
What I liked about my long walks along the Mississippi (during that brief period when I lived in Memphis) was that they were deliberate, free, and uninterrupted. They gave me just enough time to get lost and found and lost again. What I’ve liked about the best of my relationships was this same ability to get caught up in being with someone else as the rest of the world shrank from view. My best days at work have always been when I had some say in the task and time-frame, some agency over the outcomes, and could think through and solve a problem or accomplish a task. All of these things seem tied to this notion of flow, of getting lost: on the journey, in the presence of someone else, in the task, in the moment. It’s precisely then that time seems to warp and slow. It’s then that I’ve felt most in control of choosing how to spend my time and where to direct my attention (the only commodity I really have).
The notion of flow isn’t new. Beyond Boredom and Anxiety was published 25 years ago. Intuitively, I suppose it’s not even that new of a concept to me. I do wish I had, in the past, given more thought to flow and attention and notions of control. It seems as though most interpersonal struggles are somehow tied to these concepts. What are needs other than a type of attention? What is work other than the combination of time, attention, and effort – which also sounds a lot like a recipe for a successful relationship. So much of what we seem to do with our energy is this fine negotiation for balance – the need to please others (work, family, partner) while also caring for ourselves. So many of our frustrations boil down to unwanted or unexpected demands on our attention (interruptions, obligations, etc.). Much of adulthood seems to be about maintaining some semblance of control. We may have moved beyond making sense of the world through flat shapes and monotone colors. We may have added depth and shading, nuance and hues. But the world, fundamentally, remains the same. With all of the added detail, as the picture gets more crowded at the edges, and our attention grows scarce it seems important to find a simplicity in our focus. “Growing up is learning to say things better.”