2003-01-02 - 10:35 p.m.
Usually I love New Years. In fact, it is one of my favorite occasions. There is something really appealing to my Puritan little soul about new beginnings, about throwing aside holiday excesses and staring into the clear light of January with newly polished intentions and the hope of becoming a better person in the coming year.
Maybe it is just because there are always so many things that I want to change about myself and that clean slate feeling always gives me hope. Most people are over that by the time they reach my age. But not me.
Notice that I started with "usually." This year, I can only say I hope the first two days are not indicative of how my year is going to be.
We spent New Year's eve, happily without plans, making mix CDs with our new CD burner..... Skootie coordinating the the music choices and burning the CDs, me designing the cover art and playing librarian to the music collection. At midnight we jumped up and did a fast and funny dance to one of our new favorite songs "Two Little Feet" and said Happy New Year. And at about 12:10 I knocked over a full glass of red wine on Skooties desk, right into her cordless computer keyboard. We scrambled to contain the sticky mess, but the keyboard seems to be ruined. That keyboard was one of my birthday gifts to her just six months ago. I feel terrible.
The first day of the new year was also the last day of our vacation.... the vacation I had built up in my mind for months. All fall, every possible project or chore, beyond what was required to live, was put off in order to get through the awful binder job, the semester, the holidays. And I kept looking at this vacation as some kind of shining star, my big reward for spending so much of my life on have-tos. And of course it wasn't like that at all. We had to clean the house and get organized, and that was like following a hundred different strings that all lead into a big snarl.... you might think you will free just one, but then you realize that you can't until you untangle the whole mess....
So we spend the vacation cleaning and untangling our lives, and that's a good thing, certainly a good way to begin the new year. But I still felt sad on New Year's day, deciding how to spend the last day, knowing that goals could be met but my fantasy of free, unstructured creative time had grown thinner and thinner, and finally vanished.
But that's not all. Oh, no. Freefloating existential sadness is not enough to make me question the quality of the new year.
As I lay down to go to sleep last night, still wide awake at midnight (because I've been indulging my night owl tendencies for a couple of weeks), tossing and turning....I accidentally flopped my new big pillow onto the night stand and into a full glass of water, dumping it all over the books, the lamp, the quilt, the floor. Another midnight cleanup, a flurry of towels, and... at least, we say, it is only water. The worst damage seems to be a few warped pages in my books, but I still felt a little unhinged by another dramatic spill.
After a fitful night's sleep, I awoke, determined to try and have a good first day back to work, first day of the rest of my life, etc. I really thought I had all my optimism up and running. I got up early and took a shower and started a pot of coffee. Usually I have cereal for breakfast, but we were out of cereal so I decided to make some toast.... forgetting that turning the toaster oven and the coffee pot on at the same time will trip the circuit breaker. That is exactly what happened about a minute later. After traipsing down to the basement with a flashlight to turn it back on, I got the bright idea to move the toaster oven to another plug so I wouldn't have to wait. I unplugged the wrong plug and started to walk away with it. The cord tightened across the counter, knocking off a full glass of orange juice. The toaster oven was jerked from my hands, and fell, hitting my knee on the way down, before landing upside down in the pool of orange juice and broken glass on the floor. My pants and shoes were drenched in juice, a painful lump was raising on my knee cap, and all I could do was stand there and cry.
It was one of those times when I wished I could just walk away from my whole life. Or even better yet, a trap door would just open up and I would fall through and disappear. But eventually, I had to get a grip.I mopped up the mess, picked out another outfit. I plugged the toaster oven back in, and it seems to have fared better than the keyboard. After several tries, it came on and finished my TOAST.... the one thing not drenched with juice.
Luckily Skootie is sweet about all this, trying to reassure me that accidents happen. She even said she was kind of hoping the toaster oven hadn't survived, so we could get one of those cool new retro ones. And suggested I might want to put my liquids in a plastic squeeze bottle... But it has shaken me up to have three such careless accidents in such a short time. I don't know if I believe "there are no accidents" as some people say. But the reality of having three stupid accidents has me feeling jumpy and disconnected and unsure of myself.
So on to work. And as I was reading a NYT holiday editorial by John Horgan today, I was particularly struck by this passage, which I will just quote here, verbatim, rather than trying to paraphrase it:
It is one thing to know intellectually that life is a miracle. It's quite another, however, to see it. Saints and poets aside, most of us rarely do. The psychiatrist Arthur Deikman blames our pinched perception on two innate tendencies, which he calls instrumentality and automatization. Instrumentality is our compulsion to view the world through the filter of our selfish interests. Automatization is our propensity to learn tasks so thoroughly that we perform them with little or no conscious thought.
No doubt these traits have helped us survive. Automatization is a particularly attractive cognitive feature because it allows us to carry out more than one task at the same time; we can fret over our plummeting 401(k)'s while driving our children to their school Christmas concert. But instrumentality and automatization can also cause us to sleepwalk through much of life.
Yet now and then, we do not see the world as something to be manipulated for our ends. This recognition, which Dr. Deikman calls deautomatization, is the goal of all contemplative traditions. When an aspirant asked the 15th-century Zen master Ikkyu to write down a maxim of the "the highest wisdom," Ikkyu wrote one word: "Attention." The dissatisfied aspirant asked, "Is that all?" This time, Ikkyu wrote two words: "Attention. Attention."
Perhaps my sudden rash of clumsiness is a sign that I am living too much in my head and not paying enough attention to anything I do. Because so much of my life is spent on doing things I don't want to do, I have compensated by having a lively mental life. Something to think about.... preferably while sitting still.
Or maybe it is hormonal.... EVERYTHING, I've discovered, has the possibility of being hormonal. Or maybe I just got really unlucky, and the fact I think it has spiritual significance is hormonal. There are all kinds of possibilities. But I'm just trying to be really careful tonight. To pay attention.
I'll get back to the New Year's resolutions after I've gone for a full day without spilling anything. I'd hate to have to include "be more careful with liquids" on my list.
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