Letting go

 

All my life, I’ve been in a hurry, always rushing to get more done, feeling pressured by deadlines, even though they were of my own making. I remember once hurrying back to my office at five o’clock after an event had taken me away for a couple of hours. The dean of students pointed out that I was going the wrong direction and it was time to leave work, not arrive, but I replied, “If I could just get a few more things done ….”

I don’t know where this pressure came from. My memory is that my mom took life as it came. Dad, however, was a workaholic, and I can still see him sitting at the dining table, late at night, with papers spread before him, a cigarette between his fingers until he quit at the age of fifty. (I remember thinking then that fifty was soooo old—now I have kids who are older than Dad was at the time. How did this happen?)

Even retirement didn’t slow me down. I just exchanged one job for another and went from directing the TCU Press to writing full-time. For several years, I pushed myself to write three mysteries a year. Now I wonder why.

It took pandemic to slow me down. Part of it was, like all of us, I stopped going out to lunch and dinner. After a few months, Christian was amazed. “You’ve been so social! How can you just stay in the cottage day after day?” I assured him I was content. My family ate supper with me, and we had a small group of trusted friends, also quarantining, who came to visit on the patio, even in cold weather—we didn’t want to be in a small, closed room, breathing on each other. But I really was content as the whole pace of life slowed.

In the tumultuous years since the pandemic, I’ve wondered how I ever had time to write books. Many days I don’t finish my opening-the-day routine until noon or later—I read emails (I get a lot of them) and I read selected news sources online—the local newspaper, a site called atAdvocacy that I really like, Daily Kos (yes, I know, it’s a liberal rag but there’s some good stuff there), Wake Up to Politics, Texas Monthly’s daily highlights, etc. And of course food columns. Mostly I think if I don’t write by noon, I won’t get it done, because afternoon is nap time. In the last year, I’ve started staying up until almost midnight—my whole schedule has changed.

I kept thinking if the national political scene ever quieted down, I wouldn’t “waste” so much time online, But something I read recently changed my view of it: retirement and slowing down gave me “permission” to be curious, to dig down any rabbit hole that interests me, including all those political opinion pieces. For instance, for yesterday’s blog, I went exploring to find out about fake scallops and to learn about the comparison of sardines to tuna. If an article totally unrelated to anything I’m working on catches my fancy, I feel free to follow it. So now I can tell you a new trend, popularized on TikTok (no, I don’t follow that) is pairing wine and potato chips. Chardonnay alls for Kettle Salt and Vinegar. Or I can tell you about forest pre-school programs, where youngsters three to five spend 70% of their time outdoors, learning about nature, both animals and plants. My curiosity has full play.

There’s another aspect to this relaxation. If I don’t write it today, there’s always tomorrow. I never ever felt that way before—I’d set a goal of 1500 words for the day and kill myself to make it. Yesterday I had a scene in my work-in-progress in mind all day, but I just didn’t get to it. Come nine o’clock, and I’m ready to read someone else’s mystery. Then I thought, “I’ll just jot down some thoughts.” In the next hour I wrote 1200 words. If I’d forced myself to write at that hour, I’d have slogged through some uninspired passages. But because I let it happen spontaneously, I got in some good writing.

Perhaps the first sign of this new (to me) relaxation I noticed was that I stopped and stared out the window more frequently and for longer periods. At the right time of day, I can glimpse the children going to school across the street. I have a cool glass teakettle with neon blue lights indicating it’s heating. These days, I sit and watch it, stare at that blue light, watch the bubbles come up, wait for that magic moment when suddenly silently it goes dark when it reaches boiling. Never fails to fascinate me. The old me would have rushed back to the computer to make use of that two or three minutes.

None of us will ever in any way be grateful for the pandemic, but I do think this is one small benefit. And, yes, I am most content.