This from someone this summer, scribbled on some loose DayTimer pages:
“I’ve missed my other life I know and feel exists. Degrees, travel, lectures. It feels like a home I own and didn’t live in.
My home is my body. My home has been a confused, cluttered, scared mind. My home has been the small family of richness I nurtured that still thrives. My home has been human.
I think about surviving. I imagine waking up with physical or emotional pain, crippling pain.
I have wanted the luxury of degrees and conversations and plays and poems. My own life has been an actual poem, a tragedy, a comedy, a redemption story.”
Then, thoughts on the new space race:
“Are we going to space to look for love? It seems in short supply here. I’ve lived here on earth for 52 years. My friend’s faces are beginning to show lines, beautiful lines. Their children are grown and getting married. I have been told I have not done enough with what I have.”
*****
What did I think about the most this weekend?
Death and living and dying.
One of my closest friends lost her grandmother last week. She said that as she was dying, she said someone was helping her die. He was standing there, helping her come over. A few days before that, her aunt heard her say, What and When to someone as well.
I was reading last night on a Jewish website and it talks about death and someone they knew that had a similar experience. They had the choice to stay or go, a common story. Are these stories any different than the ones Jesus told? We are not listening now. We didn’t listen then.
*****
More on this is how it happens. We need a new bed for the bunk beds as El is arriving this weekend. The basement bed is decent. This one is not. It’s the old kid’s bed from ages ago.
I went to the mattress store w/ the memory of the bed in California that I’d slept on. It turns out, that’s a Tempurpedic and is a $4000 bed. So even a twin is around $2500. No go.
I sat and laid down on several other beds. I went with one that’s $400, or 10% of the cost of the other bed.
This is American life. You spend a lot of time measuring out differences between products and options. As I get older, I’m finding I have more time for this sort of thing. I start to care about the slight differences between bed products. In the absence of substantial other activities, it’s easy to see how crafting a perfect life becomes a legitimate obsession. I do it sometimes and can see the trap you fall in to.
For one, it takes time, time that could go to other people or things that provide more meaning that just buying things, even good things.
Putting time into doing things or crafting things or working on a relationship takes time away from pursuing the perfect series of products or services. Sometimes you can’t have both; sometimes you can.
But I can feel a life like that around the corner, being in my mid-50’s with kids out of the house. We have a small amount of disposable income and less of the frantic life with raising kids or the business growth.
I want to resist the urge to move in this direction. It’s tempting. It’s tempting.
*****
I’m still pretty happy about the phrase from this weekend: the tyranny of your ego. I’ve thought about that a lot and so has Jay. What can free you from the tyranny of your ego being in control?