I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.
-Bertrand Russell
To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.
So, there I am. You can't really see me in this shot, because my office sits on the back of the second floor of Tara, with its own little porch boasting a rail that strikes one just below the knee, providing the perfect pivot for a drunken flip headfirst onto the pavers below. Hence my reluctance ever to venture out there.
It's just cracked sixty degrees this morning, a fact I impart so my Florida friends may feel a little envy. The weather folks promise a high of 83 degrees, with partly cloudy skies. It sure beats the furnace of a Gulf Coast July.
I've candidly been disappointed with my writing lately, wondered if I should shut the whole thing down after reading back through whatever meander I've pounded out each weekday morning. But today it seems to me that the disorganized thoughts themselves have value and provide insight. Flux means change, refocusing, rethinking about how we view the world and live our lives up here in this bucolic valley.
As I inch into the last few days toward my 58th birthday, I realize the ransom I still owe by court order means that stopping work is not really an option, but perhaps shedding the American way of work is viable in this post-Covid vocational moment.
Let's think about the workday on, say, February 2, 2020, a pretty typical day in my post-hurricane life. Scrolling back through my calendar, I recall that back then I'd get up with a very grouchy Peg as she pulled herself out of bed and crawled into her car to embark upon the miserable slog in predawn traffic for well over an hour to work in the hellish confines of the Fort Walton Beach Medical Center. I'd run for maybe a half hour up and down the Twenty Mile Bike Path, then drink a cup of coffee and embark on my own 35 minute drive to the office in Santa Rosa Beach, cursing at the bad drivers and the good ones. There were just so many.
From there I sat in my little office next to the ladies' room and made small talk over a nasty cup of Keurig coffee, usually with some bored lawyer standing in my doorway stealing my time. My first appointment, an in-person meeting with a would-be client, began at nine. Over the next eight hours my schedule boasted three conference calls and an in-person mediation involving a bank that was stiffed in a debt.
At the end of the day, I crawled back into the truck and drove now 45 minutes, as the traffic increased, back to the empty house to wait for P's arrival at around seven. Her drive home approached two hours of crawling through the gridlock of Destin, and they were fond of keeping her late at FWBMC. I'd start on supper while I was waiting, pour a cocktail and make sure I met Peg in the carport with a glass of wine, knowing she'd be the very portrait of snarling misery here in the fourteenth hour of her day. Lovely snarling misery, mind you, but misery all the same.
There was just enough time for us to pick through supper, then turn in for the evening. Rinse and repeat.
Contrast July 7, 2022. We woke up at 5:45, and I walked downstairs to fix breakfast so P would have something on her stomach at work. She was out the door at 6:18, all smiles because she loves her work and faces a twelve minute commute through rolling green hills to get there.
Years ago I read that Cap Weinberger, when he was Secretary of Defense, would have his staff build him a binder comprised of clipped newspaper articles from around the world, so he could efficiently scan the headlines in the limo driving into work at the Pentagon. Now I can do the same thing with my tablet. And my commute? Well, there isn't one.
Today I think there are three calls on the books, maybe one of them by Zoom. I'll pace around the house, dictate, plan. There's no slippage, because there's no journey in search of lunch or mindless conversation unless the cats decide they want to talk. I bill just as many hours, sitting here in shorts and a golf polo.
Because, you see, Peg will get home around 3:30, and watch the girls by the pool while Tom and I step into the tee box at the Corning Country Club promptly at 4:02. I'm already dressed for the occasion.
Afterward P and I will likely take our walk, eat a gourmet homemade supper, and adjourn to the front porch to watch the fireflies and have a postprandial cab, unless of course I succumb to the desire for a Klondike Bar, as happened last night.
Rinse and repeat.
At some level all this feels like sloth, and I've worried that my discombobulated writing, lacking in theme or logical structure, stands as a sign that my brain's gone soft.
But that's not it at all, is it? Don't we all have the hardest time pulling our experience together in a coherent essay when our minds are busy reordering our understanding of the situation in which we find ourselves? I've fallen away from organized religion, or more accurately effaced its role in my life to simply providing a means through traditional and ritual to help me find my own way to a level of reality that transcends the material. Finding Jesus on my own, to quote John Prine, but maybe with the help of Richard Hooker and Lao-tze.
Now the real foundation of my worldview, the notion that I need to account for every billable second of my waking existence between emerging from the shower and declaring happy hour, feels like no way to live. And I cannot imagine returning to the pre-pandemic rhythms of long commutes to work, sitting in an expensive workspace for ten hours a day, and dealing with all the in-person distractions I've mostly avoided for over two years.
I would say it's all about working smarter, but it's also about working less, and taking a moment to meditate on things, or just waste time hitting golf balls or walking around the block. Because those times aren't wasted either, when you think about it.
This morning the NYT published an essay by a professor and thinker a little younger than I am, musing on his generation's relationship with work and sense of how they should spend their time.
There's a certain pessimism here I can't share--maybe the world truly is falling apart, but life and work have been pretty good to me, and I've always been an irrational optimist about our ability as a species to confront a problem when we really don't have a choice. But for me, it feels like work life has crested, I'm on the way down the backside of the hill, and we need to rethink this existence of three homes and four cars and two tractors and a boat and a plane and . . .
As has been said many times before, eventually your possessions end up owning you.
[notice how I unconsciously slipped into the second person there?]
P's always cognizant of our world getting smaller, that the shrinkage is a sign of old age that needs to be battled with whatever energy we two oldsters can muster. But maybe it's just the natural course of things, and our challenge now is to live into this space of less stuff, but more blessed idleness, in a way that is filled with grace and meaning. Only a crazy person my age would bill the kind of hours I bill, month after month, because the second tractor needs a new whatever, or life won't be complete without a second boat up here on the lake.
Having spewed that manifesto, I need to get to work if I'm going to slip off for a bit of golf later. The bills don't stop arriving just because I've decided to slow down a little.
Do you know that we get three cable bills? Three sets of utility bills? An insurance bill for covering five motor vehicles? Just nuts.
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