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"active condition", 1 and 10, 42 days, 984 hours, Aristotle, Aristotle's Ethics, art gallery, art gallery guard, awadagin pratt, birthday parties, browser tabs, cards, constraints, courage, daily blog, Ethics, freedom, grace, half-spoken thoughts, happiness, humility, journal, life is busy, living well, marriage between focus and balance, Moleskine, Navy Football, patience, photography, preoccupation, rest, Richmond Virginia, rules, Senior Essay, structure, Thanksgiving, time-management, try again, Virtue, will, wisdom
Well, folks, my dear long-neglected readers, it’s been 1 month and 10 days since we last spoke. There is many a draft hidden away in here full of half-spoken thoughts and uninterpreted links to strange and wondrous things. But those will likely never see your eyes. Although some will, maybe, in some rewritten form, maybe. One of the ways I have found this blog helpful in the past was for the opportunity of cranking out words ‘at will’ instead of having to neatly craft them into perfect little pithy sentences. So much for that sense of freedom! But it can be regained, one hopes.
I can hardly pretend to be able to bring you up to speed on the last 984 hours in a single post, but the highlights include: starting my new job as an art gallery guard; sitting in on a serendipitously inspirational concert rehearsal with Awadagin Pratt; Several amazing conversations with various friends and acquaintances; Navy Football; the beginnings of my Senior Essay; an autumn-colored trip to Richmond Virginia; a delightful Thanksgiving gathering; a few birthday parties; and most recently, for the first time ever, selling my photography — framed and on cards — at a holiday show [More on that later, if I can be trusted to ever post again, haha].
Let it suffice to say that Life is Busy. And if you let it run itself you will find yourself tumbling along after it. Take for example the fact that for this 42 day duration I haven’t read my dear friend’s daily blog, even once, although I repeatedly pulled up the site intending to do so. Despicable. I haven’t journaled once. I haven’t posted any of my really cool discoveries. I did however find that on November 9th I had over 100 browser tabs open, at once. Absurd. Let that give you a sense of the degree of preoccupation, and high gear in which this nearly runaway machine has been spinning. [In case you are wondering I did an emergency rescue operation and copy/pasted all of the addresses into a document and closed out all the open windows! I shall have to share 10 at a time over the course of 10 days, or follow some such dosage…] Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed nearly every minute of it! I just can’t seem to find the marriage between focus and balance. And therefore, many of the things that matter most to me have gone neglected.
There is this pesky little matter called time-management, a battle that I believe to be lifelong. I am currently rereading Aristotle’s Ethics in which he presents Virtue as a constant “active condition” — an ongoing process that is far from formulaic. Sadly, living well is not a matter of keeping a set of rules in mind. However, quite happily, living well is not a matter of keeping a set of rules in mind.
I am continually reminded that a life lived by grace means that my happiness does not, and cannot, depend on my own performance. However, we humans do need structure. For our freedom to be possible we have to have constraints. Just like for the greatest effort to be expended we first need rest. Oh, yes, Rest, that elusive thing that must be sought, but can never be grasped.
Even the world’s best planners [quite possibly Moleskines], or most efficient personal secretaries, aren’t sufficient to know how to best fill one’s days. For that we need wisdom, which in turn seems to require a heaping serving of humility and patience. And perhaps just as important, the will and courage to stand up and try again.