At this point in my life, I'm not doing much. Most of the time, I'm trying to finish this novel I'm writing. It's about kids who die. It's occasionally funny. For about seven hours a day, I spend most of my time either writing it or wondering whether it'll ever end.
Okay, I'll concede, I do some other stuff. I swim and do yoga a bunch. In the afternoons, I like to melt dark chocolate and pour it into molds so I can arrange for my own flavor fantasies, like peanut butter or cherries or basil ganache, rather than pushing my immature American taste buds to accept so much citrus flavored chocolate. On Mondays, I attend a jewelry class wherein I've made a fistful of rings but only finished one and it's a tad big for my portliest finger. When the mood strikes, I may pack it all in and scramble through the sand-laced wind to hunker down at a table by the window at Maranui down the road. If they've got it, I'll order a sticky date cake and eat it over a period of two hours or until the cafe closes at five. I'm very good at savoring. I also clean and cook and and obsess about money and hang laundry to dry so my obsession doesn't paralyze me.
In between all this, I ponder. I sit myself on the edge of our living room with my feet on the deck and my ass in the house and I settle in for a long think. It's time well spent, I think, because I'm pretty sure it's healthy to have a nice bit of thinking under a sky that's as ever changing as the ocean underneath it.
But wait, there's more. I almost started volunteering but I didn't because I don't really want to help someone file papers when I could be making chocolate, smelling half-dry laundry or even writing. I almost played drums with a ragtag team of musically challenged adults who claimed to have never heard The Pretenders, but I backed out of that one too. The reasons should be clear. And recently, I contemplated a course in massage, figuring that the money I've spent on my education to date really should not be compounded by any further pursuits that won't bring some sort of recompense in the door. After careful consideration, I've postponed the massage course as well since, well, really, I am trying to finish a novel and I'm only four months into my six month window for its completion. That, and I'm still unsure if I want to touch anyone who might ask for me to do so. I kind of like having a say in the matter.
I say all this because I've been thinking all day about the persistent and seemingly increasing unwillingness of the American mainstream to take a moment to have a really good think. Or, maybe I'm jumping to the wrong conclusion but everything I read about the upcoming U.S. elections and the various policy issues hamstrung by the partisan rigor in all political conversation leads me to believe that the nation's cumulative ability to reason has jumped the shark. We should be nauseous and ashamed to hear Senate candidates who celebrate their
willful ignorance of the Constitution just as I am nauseous and ashamed to hear the continuing
demonization of last year's successful attempt to begin health care reform for the population. The fact that the faces of so many of those who protest the goal of ensuring access to care for everyone are bloated and flushed doesn't help with the nausea. Apparently, the deficit of thought has helped to annihilate self-interest as well.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I should just book a flight to DC to revel with like minds at the
Rally To Restore Sanity. But, I'm a skeptic, and an optimistic one at that. I think it's gonna take more than a rally to oppose the knowledge defiance in my fair nation. It's going to take education, stability and above all, a great, big huzzah for moments spent in quiet rumination. Spending as much time as I do sitting beside endlessly crashing waves, I can promise you that the contemplation really doesn't get old and doesn't seem to be capable of excess.
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