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Signs of spring

Our weather has been all over the board, as February usually is here. We had balmy weather and tornadoes a couple of weeks back, followed almost immediately by snow. This weekend, the March winds settled in and appear to be here for a while. This town is known for its flat land and still air, so we always find high wind a bit alarming. When I lived on coastal Long Island, I never quite got used to daily winds of 40-50 mph.

I'm pleased to report that, despite the recent temps in the 70s, we don't seem poised for an unnaturally early spring. The daffodil shoots are coming up, but some years they've started blooming by now. There's nothing creepier than an unnaturally early spring. Last year, we had a late frost that did serious damage to the flowers and fruits.

I'm also pleased that we've had a good helping of cold, sunny days. My favorite kind of day looks warm and cheery, but when you go outside you remember you're alive because of that little crackle in the air. Today, the wind is blowing hard and the clear sky filled with fluffy, and increasingly dark, clouds in just an hour.

So I took a walk around the yard Saturday to check things out. Everything seemed right on schedule--a few early daffodils budding, a tiny bit of green showing on the quince, the camellias getting ready to pop out any day. All appeared as it should. I love fall and winter, but the stark beauty of early spring (quince and redbud blossoms vibrant on drab branches) is singular and brief. I'll be paying attention, waiting for it to happen this year.

Ten pounds lighter

There are probably other things I could have been doing, but I took advantage of an hour on this meeting-free morning to go through my email archive and delete old messages. I've probably mentioned before that when I arrived at this job nearly four years ago, I inherited my predecessor's electronic and paper archives.

She is a self-described "information packrat," and whenever I'm feeling particularly discouraged and have a few extra minutes of free time (almost never), I like to comfort myself by deleting e-files and recycling paper ones. (Interesting note: for an environmentally conscious person, she certainly did a lot of printing out of pages and pages of web sites.)

Up until now, I had kept conservative on my deletions. Anything associated with a project I had worked on in my time here stayed. I deleted only the items that I knew were long dead and gone. I learned early on that often, if you neglect a project long enough, people will lose interest and it will die by itself.

My email archive has been out of control for a while. Last year, I had to add a second, separate archive file just to handle the emails, and it complains about being over-full every few months. At that point I go in and delete a few big files to ease the pain.

So, today I was brutal. I deleted all the emails regarding projects from my first couple of years, for a web site that exists only in the archive graveyard, as we did a total re-launch in 2006. Then I went into most of the active folders and deleted anything from before 2006. I still have lots of musty corners, both virtual and physical, to explore in my office, but my hard drive is sighing with relief.

It was a good exercise in letting go. I've been taking a meditation class since January, which has reminded me how very poor I am at meditating. It seemed to be going pretty well at first, but now my subconscious is making a last-ditch effort to cling to its attachments. They say that, in our distracted mind, we usually gravitate toward either the past or the future.

It felt great to say goodbye to the past's electronic ghost. Over the last few years, I've kept particularly vitriolic emails from outraged faculty and other detractors, as a badge of honor, I guess. Today, I didn't hesitate to delete them all. Why hold on to the nastiness? In general, I don't have too much trouble letting go of the past. The future is the one that keeps me up at night. I'm a plot junkie.

The other thing I noted while deleting emails was, damn, I have done a lot of work over the last four years. I've come a very long way and my job has changed tangibly because of hard work. I've built and distributed sites for close to 30 offices that used to rely on my to do even their most minute updates. I've managed a major web site redesign and moved from chief peon to a manager of several people and a somewhat respected (as much as anyone ever gets respect around here) voice about online marketing. And you know what? I deserve it because I worked my ass off.

Most days are so demanding that I just keep my head down and try to focus on the question of the moment. Sometimes it's incredibly detailed (this table won't line up with this image; how do we word these instructions?) and other times it's big picture (how do we get these people to do this thing we want them to do?). Rarely do I step back and see the full, sprawling project. Rarely do I have the time to look at my work and think, "my, how you've grown!"

Triangulating my whereabouts

I'm taking a meditation class. So far it's not the kind where you sit around the floor in your socks, although I've taken a class like that before, and I'm pro-sitting-on-the-floor-in-your-socks.

I used to have a fairly disciplined and regular yoga practice. I went to class for five years and practiced at home. Sometime in 2004, that started to fall victim to a more mainstream workout regimen and my inability to make the time for aerobic exercise and yoga. And I'm all the worse for it.

This class is offered through my alma mater/employer's continuing ed. program, and I've considered taking it for years. This time, I finally just signed up before I had time to cook up an excuse. I like that it's based on findings by folks like John Kabat-Zinn, whose book I read geez, like 11 years ago when I worked in a bookstore and could "check" books out. How cool is that, that employees could treat the store like a library?

We haven't actually started meditating (that comes with tomorrow's class), but we've been reading about why we should and the potential benefits. I'm pretty familiar with why I should meditate, thank you very much. I'm very in touch with how scattered and unproductive my thoughts are. They've been keeping me up every night.

So I'm ready to jump in there and give it another try. After I read Kabat-Zinn's book, I maintained a practice for a few months, but I was just starting to settle into it when I moved off to grad school and a new world of pain. Later I had my yoga practice, and that gave me a better sense of how, slowly and subtly, I could develop some skillful reactions. I understand where I need to go now, and I'm ready to put in the miles. (Did I just make a journey metaphor?)

My assignment for class this week is to reflect on the question, if your life were a book, what type would it be and what chapter are you on?

Of course, as a writer I'm tempted to propose some wildly improbable type of book. I'm a cookbook! No, I'm a manual for a chainsaw! But really, I try to view my life as a dark comedy. Things happen, and I usually manage to have a laugh about them at some point, or else I appreciate them for their poignancy, the way they are sad but illuminating.

And I am a plot junkie, always on the edge of my seat waiting for the next twist. I think this is one of the problems. I'm always looking ahead and trying to make up the story, like a character in your typical metafiction narrative. And we all laugh and feel sorry for the character--oh, she thinks she's so in control.

Maybe my location in this book is the end of a chapter, perpetually at the end of a chapter. All I know is, I am exhausted. I've been growing increasingly so for some months, both from the insomnia and from reaching a dead stop on this one fascinating little puzzle I've been working on for a while. It was a charming distraction for a while, and now it's taken over my life.

So here's to meditation, the antonym to distraction.

Comfort in the previous

This entire fall has been one long reunion. It started with the official thing, college homecoming, with a trickle of long-lost friends who had connections to other, longer-lost friends. For weeks after, I was corresponding with people I hadn't seen or heard from in three, five, ten years.

Then there's the whole web 2 thing. I've been largely passive, seeking out only a few people. To tell the truth, I've set up profile-bait more as an experiment to see what The Kids These Days Are Doing, since it's part of my job to care. A lot. The longer my line is out, though, the more I've heard from all sorts of old acquaintances.

I've reached two conclusions based on this happy deluge from the past:

1) Regardless of the irreconcilable differences that made you part company with friends when you were 22, the primary emotion felt universally by all parties when you reconnect is relief. At my ten-year high school reunion, I was alarmed to see that everyone slipped back into their high school roles immediately--the bully, the nerd, the snobby. Lots of snobs.

At my college reunion, my male friends in particular reverted to the joking, the non-stop strings of profanity offensive to all cultures and creeds, but there was something different, too. They had aged, and it suited them well. More than anything, they were confident. Their success in life had helped them relax, if only a little, and it made everything more pleasant.

The slights and disrespect we suffered from each other in college were trivial or forgotten completely. Forgiveness flowed freely, along with the alcohol, but it was sincere. No one wanted to be mad any more.

2) There is an unexpected and deep comfort in the previous. I've been corresponding with a friend with whom I've had minimal contact in the last six years. We write each other most days now. It's hard to believe how easily we picked up the rhythm. The first few times he wrote, it surprised me how much he sounded the same, just in the way he worded his messages.

Of course we've both changed in the intervening years, and it's easy to buy into an illusion that we still know each other so thoroughly. Still, the feeling of comfort, of sheer "glad to hear from you today," can only come from a long-standing friendship. It's the way you trust someone when you know you've got nothing to prove and nothing to hide.

I feel it in stark contrast to some of my newer friendships, where we maintain only the illusion of honesty and intimacy. We're telling each other what appears to be our life stories, but in reality we're editing the details. Is that what happens as we get older and have more to hide and more to lose?

Long-lost

Hey Blog,

I know, I've been bad. Three months with no posts. It's not that I didn't think of you. I had lots of interesting ideas about which I might have spouted, but I guess my attention has been elsewhere.

August and September were pretty much unspeakable. For about six weeks, we were pretty sure my mother was having a recurrence of cancer. Looking back, I'm not sure how I spent my time during those days. I guess I was at my parents' house a lot. When I did go home, I didn't do anything, not even watch TV. I think I wandered from room to room, pretending to clean things.

Well, we got a freebie. It wasn't cancer, and things are mostly back to normal now. It took some time to let go of the feeling of constant dread, like I was walking around terrified, with my eyes bugged out all the time.

Lots of good things have happened since then. I went to some parties and drove in a time-speed-distance rally, for which I placed "dead last but finished." I spent time with my closest friends, caught up with some of the long-lost ones and even made a few new ones. I made plans to travel and see other friends. I may get a promotion soon.

Over Thanksgiving break, I actually slept 8-10 hours a night. My stomach didn't hurt, and I found myself thinking about some things that really give me joy--cooking, yoga, fixing things in my house, hiking.

This last point is important, because lately too much of my energy has been consumed with pettiness and anger about situations and people beyond my control. Why is it so easy to get sucked into the negative story? I think it's the lure of the ongoing narrative. Also, much as I insist I'm not controlling, there are situations that bring it out in me.

Blah, blah, blah. Isn't it boring when people talk in generalities? Too bad I'm not going to dish the details.

Tiniest in-box ever

Let's savor this moment.

I've just whittled my in-box down to four little messages, and only one of them is really out-dated (from almost a year ago).

We're at a critical point here, people. Faculty are already starting to trickle back. I see them wandering around in the 98-degree heat, with their wrinkled shorts and pale legs. Last night I went to my neighborhood bar and encountered a few dining al fresco.

Very soon, probably Monday, they will resume their clamoring--requests for web sites or media coverage, color printers, whatever strokes the ego. The students will return the week after that.

This afternoon, I'm going to sit and enjoy the silence of my in-box.