Saturday, November 26, 2011
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
What's Elvis Costello doing right now?
I just returned from a three month sojourn to a parallel universe. I work, I have a job, but I also have a friend who was circumnavigating the world on his 32' sailboat and he asked if I'd dig sailing from Tahiti to New Zealand with him. Yeah, I'd dig that. So I stepped out of my life into that life. Here's what I discovered (or rediscovered): living without working for the man equals living your life in real time. Living your life in real time means actually living - spending your precious time, your minutes...your hours, appreciating living. Tactile. Open. Not rushing through time but savouring it. Discovering. Don't need to numb yourself, life is alive. I work two jobs really: I design and produce a clothing line and I'm also a nurse of sorts. So I work all the time cause when I'm not doing one I'm doing the other. Those three months were a chance to step outside myself and observe my life from above. Can you imagine that? How often are we able to remove ourselves from the minutiae of our lives and (metaphor coming) look at the entire forest instead of the individual trees? Not often. But I'll tell you something right now, it's a rocky transition back. Like re-entering the atmosphere after a little jaunt to Mars - coming through the ozone is notoriously bumpy. I feel like I'm in the middle of the ozone right now and I'm white knuckling it along. Entire days feel so confusing all I can do is drink at the end of the day, hoping for some sort of respite. And at the same time I'm grateful for the overall perspective I received from those many weeks of looking out at the ocean and thinking, thinking, thinking (all that thinking about myself ultimately seemed a little gratuitous but, well, that's another story).
Okay, now I'm here and I'm back to sewing and back to nursing and back to schedules and back to accountability and back to traffic and back to grocery stores and back to elevator music and back to interacting with people I'd rather not talk to. BUT, I'm also back to hot showers and washing machines and paychecks and a warm bed. Pheesh....even as I write that I'm not believing myself. I'd trade all that to go back to the adventure. To go back to living life in real time. So I guess the rub is: how do I learn to apply the way of life I experienced on the boat to my current situation? How do I experience "life in real time" during the punching-of-the-clock kind of life. Cause I can, right? I mean in the end it's all up to me, right? My perspective, my attitude, my presence of being. All possible to perspective it the same way whether I'm on a boat or working in a clinic. I haven't figured that out just yet.
I backpacked around Europe and India from 2008-2010. Re-entering society seemed like hell then, but I had a boyfriend who'd been traveling with me and was going through the same thing and we worked through it together. Also, backpacking around in other cultures still meant you were in society. This is different - I just came back from a complete removal from society. And god almighty was I happy to be removed from society. At one point Joel and I sailed for two weeks straight without seeing land, boat, mineral or animal. Fourteen days of seeing nothing but the sea and the sky. Imagine that: every day for two weeks: sea and sky and an occasional bird. And I couldn't have been happier. I couldn't have been happier. I didn't want to go into port, I wanted to stay out there forever. Even now I want to go back. At night the stars were so dense we could take the binoculars and see layers upon layers. The clouds would hang low and be lit up by the full moon and look like something out of a fairy tale. We'd watch the moon rise, the sun rise, the waves change, the wind shift. When life is dialed down to that level of simplicity....us and the elements...the freedom that lies therein is incredible.
I'm reminded of something I read by Chuck Palahniuk: "You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you."
I'm confused by why I work, why I don't spend my life in the pursuit of living. Here I am in this house, consuming electricity, consuming gas, consuming bandwidth, consuming consuming. I don't like this, it doesn't make me feel good. And at the same time I have friends who are consumed in a different way: consumed by fighting against the system. Consumed in activism. Living in society to push against society. Proud that they buy food at the co-op instead of the Safeway. Little victories. Seems futile. I don't want any of it. All of it seems like a time waster, a life waster. And time is the only thing we have, time in the present tense.
So it's all about leaving your mark, right? I like reading history because I'm always tripped out about people's lives in 1594 or 1747 or 1823. Individually we feel like our universe is so important and so relevant, but people felt that way in 1622 also. And in 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. In actuality our lives are insignificant to the point of ridiculousness. I guess that's why people have kids, to feel like they've contributed something concrete to the world. But there are as many kids in the world as there are misplaced good intentions. I would like to use my flyspeck of a life with my miniscule good intentions to elevate my soul...I'm choosing to believe in reincarnation and I'm choosing to believe that my goal in this lifetime is to search and destroy my hangups in order to make my next life all the more enlightened. And eventually get to the point where I don't even have to come to earth anymore - I can just hang out in nirvana.
For this entire day - this day that I've spent not outside looking at trees but inside sewing clothing to sell to people - this entire day I've listened to the soundtrack to High Fidelity over and over again which (ironically, right?) has an Elvis Costello song called "Shipbuilding". In it he sings "we will be shipbuilding with all the will in the world, diving for dear life when we could be diving for pearls". I don't actually know what that means but it seems to relate, especially as I drink more wine.
I recently ended a long relationship and in these moments of loneliness I miss having someone to talk to, someone to fight with, someone to bitch about, someone to be annoyed at, someone to focus on thereby removing myself from myself. Someone. So I called my friend Kipp and he made me laugh. And earlier I texted my friend Allison and she made me laugh. And earlier my friend Annie called me and listened to me and then made me laugh. And those things are beautiful. They're what we live for, right? People that know you, that have seen you through ugly and beautiful? Friends. More important than lovers.
And if I could find a friend who was also a lover....then....wouldn't I be the happiest girl in the world? Well, I guess that would still be up to me. Ultimately.
Okay, now I'm here and I'm back to sewing and back to nursing and back to schedules and back to accountability and back to traffic and back to grocery stores and back to elevator music and back to interacting with people I'd rather not talk to. BUT, I'm also back to hot showers and washing machines and paychecks and a warm bed. Pheesh....even as I write that I'm not believing myself. I'd trade all that to go back to the adventure. To go back to living life in real time. So I guess the rub is: how do I learn to apply the way of life I experienced on the boat to my current situation? How do I experience "life in real time" during the punching-of-the-clock kind of life. Cause I can, right? I mean in the end it's all up to me, right? My perspective, my attitude, my presence of being. All possible to perspective it the same way whether I'm on a boat or working in a clinic. I haven't figured that out just yet.
I backpacked around Europe and India from 2008-2010. Re-entering society seemed like hell then, but I had a boyfriend who'd been traveling with me and was going through the same thing and we worked through it together. Also, backpacking around in other cultures still meant you were in society. This is different - I just came back from a complete removal from society. And god almighty was I happy to be removed from society. At one point Joel and I sailed for two weeks straight without seeing land, boat, mineral or animal. Fourteen days of seeing nothing but the sea and the sky. Imagine that: every day for two weeks: sea and sky and an occasional bird. And I couldn't have been happier. I couldn't have been happier. I didn't want to go into port, I wanted to stay out there forever. Even now I want to go back. At night the stars were so dense we could take the binoculars and see layers upon layers. The clouds would hang low and be lit up by the full moon and look like something out of a fairy tale. We'd watch the moon rise, the sun rise, the waves change, the wind shift. When life is dialed down to that level of simplicity....us and the elements...the freedom that lies therein is incredible.
I'm reminded of something I read by Chuck Palahniuk: "You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you."
I'm confused by why I work, why I don't spend my life in the pursuit of living. Here I am in this house, consuming electricity, consuming gas, consuming bandwidth, consuming consuming. I don't like this, it doesn't make me feel good. And at the same time I have friends who are consumed in a different way: consumed by fighting against the system. Consumed in activism. Living in society to push against society. Proud that they buy food at the co-op instead of the Safeway. Little victories. Seems futile. I don't want any of it. All of it seems like a time waster, a life waster. And time is the only thing we have, time in the present tense.
So it's all about leaving your mark, right? I like reading history because I'm always tripped out about people's lives in 1594 or 1747 or 1823. Individually we feel like our universe is so important and so relevant, but people felt that way in 1622 also. And in 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. In actuality our lives are insignificant to the point of ridiculousness. I guess that's why people have kids, to feel like they've contributed something concrete to the world. But there are as many kids in the world as there are misplaced good intentions. I would like to use my flyspeck of a life with my miniscule good intentions to elevate my soul...I'm choosing to believe in reincarnation and I'm choosing to believe that my goal in this lifetime is to search and destroy my hangups in order to make my next life all the more enlightened. And eventually get to the point where I don't even have to come to earth anymore - I can just hang out in nirvana.
For this entire day - this day that I've spent not outside looking at trees but inside sewing clothing to sell to people - this entire day I've listened to the soundtrack to High Fidelity over and over again which (ironically, right?) has an Elvis Costello song called "Shipbuilding". In it he sings "we will be shipbuilding with all the will in the world, diving for dear life when we could be diving for pearls". I don't actually know what that means but it seems to relate, especially as I drink more wine.
I recently ended a long relationship and in these moments of loneliness I miss having someone to talk to, someone to fight with, someone to bitch about, someone to be annoyed at, someone to focus on thereby removing myself from myself. Someone. So I called my friend Kipp and he made me laugh. And earlier I texted my friend Allison and she made me laugh. And earlier my friend Annie called me and listened to me and then made me laugh. And those things are beautiful. They're what we live for, right? People that know you, that have seen you through ugly and beautiful? Friends. More important than lovers.
And if I could find a friend who was also a lover....then....wouldn't I be the happiest girl in the world? Well, I guess that would still be up to me. Ultimately.
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