Duty is the sublimest word in the language; you can never do more than your duty; you should never wish to do less.
-Robert E. Lee
Day four of life on the air mattress begins grey, wet, and windy.
And yes, if you look closely that's an Agriculture tag on the back of the truck. Always more comfortable as the pretend farmer than the pretend surfer, so the Catch A Wave Guy had to go this renewal time.
Yesterday ran fourteen hours from leaving the office to butt hitting barstool at the Yacht Club for steak, salad, Rodney Strong and the Braves debacle in the World Series. I was asleep by nine, unable to muster the energy for a couple hours of nocturnal trial prep.
Will today be any better? I scan my calendar and see multiple appointments--witness prep sessions, a hearing with a whiny opposing counsel who has never seen her role as solving problems and resolving disputes when accusing the other side of shenanigans is so much more lucrative and satisfying to her very bad client, a meeting at the bank to go over financing the condo rebuild, and a reception for the Inn of Court at the yacht club. I can't run at this pace much longer.
This morning when I rolled over on the semi-inflated mattress, I noticed on my shelf a copy of Good Work, a book that caught my interest over twenty years ago. The author studied what it took for subjects to feel they'd lived a fulfilling professional life. The conclusion? Work has to have meaning in the sense that it improves the lives of others, and the happiest respondents were the ones who'd lived a life of service to their community.
That was me for a while. Jeez, just look at my CV. President of the Pops. President of the local Kiwanis Club. Inn of Court President. 5k Chairman. Vestryman. Manager of the church food bank and creator of a program that brought backpacks full of food to a local school for the kids who'd go home each Friday to an empty pantry. Youth soccer coach. Etc. Etc.
I don't do any of that now, not one thing. I get annoyed when someone suggests I show up for some charity or community function, don't want to lead any nonprofit organization or even participate in one, although I can see myself getting guilted into a little of that around here.
Why has my sense of duty left me? These days I just want to take walks with Peg, watch the leaves change, read a book on the couch or maybe drive the zero-turn around the curtilage at Wyldswood.
Part of it is that we find ourselves putting several adults through school these days, which P reminds me is a form of community service in itself when I characterize it as ransom. Paying for the party requires lots of billable work, and I simply don't have time to go give sponge baths to homeless vets. My inner Scrooge is emerging, just in time for the holidays.
Of course, there's no overlooking the fact that often folks who immerse themselves in obsessive community service are unhappy at home, or compensating for some pain left behind from some other time in their lives. Working at the Salvation Army takes their mind off the misery, gives a little purpose and self-esteem when an inner voice or outer spouse is pointing out their shortcomings at every turn. Or, at the extreme macro level, they are hoping to earn green stamps in the heavenly book so God will overlook some moral failure and reward them with, well, whatever lies beyond.
I may once have carried around a little of all that, but the difference these days is that, this brief separation with P aside, I'm a lot happier now than I was when I spent every free moment in a board meeting or cooking burgers for poor kids. There's nothing from which to escape, I've made my peace with my failures over the last five-plus decades, and I've reached a point in my theological journey where I agree with Don Williams's observation about the Almighty: "He knows who does and doesn't care." A happy man doesn't leave home to march into the trenches, as Pasternak once wrote.
Finally, it's just the nature of this season of life not to want to commit oneself to much of anything. I ran across an interesting essay in the WSJ yesterday, in which a professor who'd spent his life studying retirement recounted the things that surprised him or resonated with his research when he reached the end of his own professional career.
They appear to have put it behind a paywall since I read it yesterday. Sorry about that. You'll just have to take my word for it that one of his takeaways was that he found himself resisting committing to be at any one place at any one time, or to taking on a project as a matter of duty.
I see that in myself these days. I don't want to open my calendar and see anything but a big empty space where I can work and think without having to be somewhere, even if that "somewhere" is a Zoom screen. I get annoyed when something I didn't approve shows up as an appointment. I don't want anyone, except Peg maybe, to own a piece of my time.
So I certainly am not out looking for opportunities to do charity work. Of course, I look back on my Kiwanis days, and the committees that performed all the heavy lifting in the community were always filled with old retired guys. Maybe they were bored. I just don't see myself in that mold as I get older and more jealous of my time each day.
Speaking of commitments, my first witness interview is in an hour and forty-five, and I need to get cracking on a witness outline to review with her. Here we go.
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