A memorable week that I can scarcely recall lies behind me. Hosting cousins who live far away, playing pickup soccer together, visiting, early morning exercise, teaching, marking, cycling, reading stories, watching feminist movies, coaching practices and games almost every evening. I staggered to my Thursday practice and recognized that I was almost sleepwalking; yet somehow practice went ahead, I was running around the field, instructing, demonstrating, playing. I drove home in a haze, stopped to put gas in the little car, arrived to a houseful of awake children, Kevin racing out the door for … more soccer, I think? I’m not sure. All I know is that I needed to get the children to bed, and myself.
I sat down beside one child and rubbed her back, briefly, and it was enough to set her on the path toward bed. It’s the little things. Yelling, cajoling, ordering — these are mostly useless tactics; or these are tactics useless to me. Patience, empathy, a gentle touch are infinitely more effective. I’m trying to decide whether exhaustion makes me a more effective leader or a less effective leader; logic would suggest the latter, although oddly, the fog of exhaustion can create an aura of peaceful calm through which I gaze, slightly disengaged, but also without the energy for upset.
This is my current definition of balance.
Yesterday, I worked from 8:30am until after midnight, non-stop, to finish all of the things I needed to finish in order to shift my focus to a soccer tournament this weekend.
None of those things were writing.
The questions currently plaguing me are tangled up in my mind … Can we (I) afford for me to be doing so much volunteer work? How could I earn more, more consistently? Is there space in my life to continue pursuing writing as a career, or, when surveying the landscape, should I accept that writing has been relegated to the level of hobby? Do I want my writing to be more than a hobby? If so, what am I willing to change or drop? And finally, should I be prioritizing earning money, or … what’s the or? How does it change my outlook and goals if I were to prioritize earning money? What would I be doing differently, and is that what I should be doing? A person wants to live a purposeful life, a useful life; a person doesn’t want her family to suffer for her choices. We live a life of many luxuries: our needs (and “needs”) accumulate and become normalized. What would we (I) be willing to give up? And for what?
This post was going to be about a bird. Yesterday, I spent an hour working outside, sitting in a lawn chair beside a small grey bird that had flown into our dining-room window. I heard it strike, and saw it fall. After googling “how to help a stunned bird,” I concluded that keeping it safe from predators was the most straight-forward course of action. The bird had righted itself. It did not appear wounded. I sat, reading, taking notes, watching. Gradually, the little bird began looking around. Finally, it startled and ran under my chair, and then it disappeared, and I couldn’t find it. Had the little bird flown away? Or had it kept running, was it hiding in the vines and undergrowth of the house next door?
I could only hope that the bird would survive.
Was this act of witness useful?
Is it for me to judge what is useful? But yes, I think, I must, so that I know how to direct my energies, so that I can be sure and focused and committed, every day. How can I make critical changes in behaviour and priorities if I don’t know? Am I going to keep sleepwalking, sleepwalking, sleepwalking? Here is the poem that comes to mind, and calms my mind. It’s a poem I must commit to memory along with the few that are there now, rattling around my brain — as useful as any tool I’ve found.
The Summer Day
Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?—Mary Oliver
xo, Carrie