I was a little under the weather last week. A close encounter with gluten, a cat bite, achy joints and muscle fog, a course of antibiotics, and the confirmation that I will be in the apartment another six months. Everything piled up on me and I took it a little harder than I would have expected. I was not really surprised by the delay. I knew that the original schedule could not be maintained, was not being maintained, but even then, it was an idea that I acknowledged only partially. And so, although not a shock, actual acknowledgement still felt like a minor upset, perhaps because I was already slightly out of sorts. The extended timeline came smack up with my own sense of what can be tolerated temporarily and what needs to be changed in order for me to be comfortable for the long haul.
Hence the past week also became a week of sorting. Of resettling, but also of reacquaintance with favorite things.
I have been in the apartment long enough to know what is not really working. The "not" was hitting hard last week, and, being an over thinker and an over-organizer, I suppose this is not surprising. I hadn't fully gotten myself settled before life got in the way and I allowed myself to get over-busy. What is over-busy after all, when you are already an over-thinker, and perhaps an over-organizer? Well, for someone like me, who tends toward too-muchness, who is often all in, or all out, they go hand in hand, busyness and organization, and when one is out of whack with the other, I flounder. Last week, already feeling under the weather, I was flopping around a bit, like a fish out of water, gasping for air. I often walk a fine line between my need for creativity and its attendant mess and my need for simplicity and organization. Last week a line broke and needed to be restrung.
There were good things too of course.
1. I've been cooking. I revisited a recipe from last spring, stuffed egg crepes, a kind of omelet filled with savory pork, topped here with some Acar Timun, a Javanese fresh pickle/salad. The pickle was left over from the night before, the first time I'd had people over for dinner. The brightness went well with the savoriness of the omelet, a kind of happy accident, a reminder of conversations and the sometimes surprising intersections of life.
2. I went to the symphony last weekend. I'll write more about that later. I will go to the opera this weekend and I need to thank a friend for egging me on. I love going to opera, the spectacle of it, the combination of staging plus music, but I don't often think to go. I don't think of opera in terms of music, but I do enjoy the experience itself, and perhaps that is something I need to think about more.
3. I read Donal Ryan's novel, From a Low and Quiet Sea, and it too, was about empathy (a theme this year in my Booker reading? Are there themes in Booker selections?). In this case the reader is drawn into the thoughts and experiments of three men, three men who are very different from each other, and very different from anything in my experience. The writing is beautifully evocative, and I felt a sense of kindness toward these men, and a beginning of understanding of something that I would once have found off-putting. Ryan brings connects us to the humanity of his characters through what is really a rather subtle, and often not particularly clear exploration. Perhaps because there is but one author, although I think this is actually more intentional, there is a commonality amid the differences in the voices, as if delineating a thread of commonality that exists in all humanity, despite the often radical differences in the ways our lives take shape. In the end the three lives are brought together in an intersection that leaves as many questions as it does answers, and yet it feels complete.
4. I have started taking Tikka back to our neighborhood in the late afternoons. It started as a happy accident, she was out with me for a ride while I picked up mail, and I noted how excited she was, leaping out of the car and dancing around her yard, eager to reacquaint herself with her neighborhood. We started making a habit of it, and now she dances at the door when it becomes time for our afternoon car ride and walk. Once we arrive, she sets the direction and the pace. I simply let her walk as much or as little as she desires. I am finding that I enjoy these afternoon strolls, short or long, as much as I enjoy my own morning walks. There is no agenda, no goal, simply time and place.
These are important things: Friends, family, place, food, music. But although my house, and my neighborhood are home, this place has to be home as well, not just a packing container on the road of life. And so it is time to finish settling in. I remember moving in with George, oh so many decades ago, and asking him why a particular thing was stored a particular way even though it was, to my way of thinking at least, incredibly inconvenient. His answer? "That's where we put it the day we moved in, and so it just stayed there". Nearly 35 years later I remain incredulous. I can happily never rearrange things once they work, but until then it is a process. Or perhaps I just see my relationship with space as just that, a relationship; a relationship to space, to time, and perhaps just to life and where I am in that life in any given moment. It is about not living your life waiting for the next stage but about being in this one.
