I fly around and around in circles
Or what I've been up to since the semester ended
Maybe you’re like me and you have this narrative in your head that goes something like this—“I will get X, Y and Z done once [BLANK] happens.” For example, mine goes, “I’ll clean out that closet and fix my website and start a new business and write a novel once the semester ends.” That’s realistic, right?
Maybe if you’re like me, you spend a lot of time anxiously anticipating the day when [BLANK] finally arrives. Maybe your list of all the things you’ll get done gets longer and longer. Perhaps the list becomes a bit unreasonable, like, “I will become a radically different and (of course) better person when the semester ends.”
Maybe, just maybe, when [BLANK] finally happens, you do not immediately dive into that list. Perhaps you do not walk every day like you promised yourself you would. You do not do the exercises for your creaky knees which you just don’t seem to have enough time to do when the semester is in full swing. Perhaps the closet remains murky and full of things that fall out on you every time you open the door. Perhaps you decide you don’t want to write a novel after all.
No? Sound familiar? Just me?
Last week while I was not cleaning out the closet or starting a new business, I lay on the lounge chair in our backyard. I’d say I was reading, but I wasn’t even really doing that. I was just lying there in a sort of drowsy state of semi-awareness, hoping I’d fall asleep and stop having to think about all the things I was not doing.
Two cardinals flew by, both male, one chasing the other. Then they flew by again. And again. And again. Occasionally, the first cardinal would land in our nectarine tree or on one of the electrical wires. But then the second cardinal would catch up and they’d start all over again. Around and around and around my yard and my neighbor’s yard. This went on for at least the two hours I was lying in the lounge chair, not doing things.
It seemed certain this activity would end only when one of the birds died from exhaustion. On the one hand, if this behavior is the result of millions of years of evolution it seems, well, patently stupid. On the other hand, yeah, I get it, cardinal dudes.
This is sort of what I’ve been doing since the semester ended—flying around and around in endless circles, chasing some doppelganger version of myself. The version of myself that tackled that closet immediately, with big garbage bags and boxes and a confident sense of what the hell to do with the snare drum we bought our daughter and which she never once played but now lives in the closet like the ghosts of all our failed aspirations.
Here's a short list of some of things I’ve been doing instead of all those things I meant to be doing:
- Getting poison ivy from cutting back the healthy crop that grows along our fence. I guess this was a productive activity, except if there’s one thing I know about poison ivy, it’s that it will grow back. Also, the day after I cut the poison ivy, the temperature plummeted, so now I have poison ivy and I’m cold, which is so mean.
- Ditched the novel I was going to write. I mean, I wrote 20,000 words and realized I didn’t want to be writing that novel. Is that the equivalent of flying around and around in circles? You be the judge.
- I did make a very fancy spreadsheet to track all the essays I decided I’ll be working on instead of that novel. I’ve started approximately five essays. I haven’t finished any of them.
- Spent a lot of time wondering if it’s okay to have three cups of tea in the morning instead of two. I mean, if I were British I’d basically be on an IV drip of tea, right? At least that’s the way it is in all the British novels I read, where literally about half of every page is taken up with people either making or pouring or drinking tea. Oh, shit, that’s the key to writing a novel, isn’t it? Have people drink shit-tons of tea.
- Okay, I did reach 600 subscribers on here, which much like the semester ending, felt like it would matter more than it actually did. I didn’t even get the happy e-mail from Substack you’re supposed to get when you cross a “milestone.” Or maybe 600 subscribers isn’t a milestone? Or maybe Substack hates me? I’m sort of okay with that.
- Watched another episode of Shogun, which, friends, maybe I’m not understanding something, but I think is not at all a good show. I didn’t watch the original Shogun, though my husband has very fond, nostalgic feelings about it. I’ve never read the novel, either. But I can’t believe either of them could be this bad. The guy who plays the Englishman stuck in Japan? I hate his face. Hate it. I want to punch him in his stupid face. Why is he even there? Really, I wish the show were just this guy all the time, making his weird grunting noises and being baffled by how fucking serious everyone is all the time and how often they commit seppuku.
It's quite the impressive list, isn’t it?
Really, I have no idea why the cardinals were flying around and around in circles in my backyard. I suspect it has to do with sex, which Darwin wants us to believe is at the root of most animal behavior. But what does Darwin know? Maybe the cardinals were just a bit disoriented. A bit at loose ends.
This is how the end of the semester always feels. I want to plunge into that list of all the important things I’ve put off until the semester ends. But the truth is that maybe the first and most important thing on that list is just to rest. Maybe it’s a good idea to spend some time not doing the things on my list. Maybe it’s good to spend some time not doing anything at all, even if that might feel like flying around in endless circles. I mean, leave aside the whole sexual selection and survival of the fittest thing and what the cardinals were doing actually looked pretty fun.
I don’t know, but that’s what I’m going with. The closet will wait. In the space I made by not forcing myself to write a novel I didn’t want to write, maybe something else will surface. I didn’t put it on that to-do list, but lying in my lounge chair in the backyard is a very important part of my summer activities.
Anyway, I’m off to make that third cup of tea, and see what the cardinals are up to now.
I always gave myself about 2 weeks of doing nothing but reading non stop light fiction at the end of every semester because I knew that eventually I would get bored (or to put a positive spin--my body and brain would finally get rested) and then I would start to do things. Never as much as I hoped, but at least some of the things were on my to-do list. Often I would take out my novel that I worked on for twenty years), or my lecture notes (I had a friend who was constantly revising her lecture notes, so I would feel that I should at least give this a stab over the summer), and without fail this would cause me to go clean instead. Like the kind of cleaning where I took everything out of the kitchen cabinets and washed them. Again, I knew this was going to happen and had resigned myself that at least I could get some cleaning done. I think that if I had a substack at that point, probably I would have done that and to hell with the cleaning. So maybe it was a good thing for my husband's dust allergies that I didn't back then. Because now that I am "retired" and writing is my full-time job so I work 12 months of the year, it seems it has been years since those kitchen cabinets got cleaned, and instead, my distraction from writing has become writing my substack posts and reading and enjoying the substack posts by you and others. But now I promise, I am not going to read any other posts or make any comments until I spend at least 30 minutes editing the current novel...or starting on my daily post. Or maybe just stare out the window at the house finches chasing each other off the bird feeder. oh how I miss cardinals!
As a Brit (though living in the US now), I can attest to the fact that half of what we do while British is make and drink tea.