Monday, November 19, 2012

A Compressed Life

     I had the choice, yesterday--Sunday--of writing in my blog or planting flower bulbs in the garden along the front walkway.
     Carmine and I gathered our things:  weed bucket, trowel, bulbs.  Otherwise, he would have had to sit and stare at me as I sat in front of the computer for an hour.  That didn't seem fair.
     When you add it up, a life contains only so much "free time."  For me, that amounts to fourteen hours a week when I am not guiding and prompting Carmine, my autistic son, or sleeping, or working at the clinic.
     I wonder if other people are constantly thinking about this, as I am?
     There are fourteen hours a week when I am not beholden to anyone.  In these hours, my mind belongs only to me.  I feel time-rich:  it used to be, like many working mothers, that I had zero hours--in the days when I raised my sons and worked sixteen-hour days, feeling guilty all the time about not being a good enough parent, not being present enough for anyone.
     I could have sacrificed sleep, which I often did as a way of "stealing" free time when the boys were sleeping, so that the small, patient fox-cub of my imagination wouldn't wander alone in the woods, and starve.
     Why do so many people make the choice to smoke weed or snort cocaine in the free time allotted them?  It's a little like selling one's brain for something else--a disorienting amusement park ride, from which you come out with... what?  One-third of my patients have positive drug tests.  But almost none can tell me why. 
     "Why are you spending your brain like this," I ask? 
     We only have so much time to feel our way through the world.   Don't people like what's in their heads?
     Every week has 168 hours.  Forty are spent working, at least for most employed people, and five or ten driving, and a few getting ready for work, and fifty-six sleeping.  And forty--it seems--talking, texting, or facebooking.  Then there are TV, meals, laundry, showering.
     There's not much left, after that. 
     What is left is the time we have to make ourselves into who we are.  Sometimes I look at my patients--and myself--and ask:  Who are these people?  Are we trying to become something, or are we who we are by default, because we haven't thought about it at all?
     Dropping bulbs in holes in the ground, covering them with sandy humus, replacing the stray earthworm trundled out of sleep in scoops of upturned earth, smiling at Carmine in the gray-blue light, felt like doing something that wasn't by default.  It was person-building.
     It's nice, too, to be engrossed in activity that doesn't have as its reference point the stupid government.
     In March, when a hundred daffodils poke up through the ground, the government won't matter at all.

1 comment:

  1. NOW THAT IS POSITIVE THINKING
    IN ANY BOOK AND
    IN ANY LANGUAGE.

    GOD BLESS YOU DR C
    AND KEEP ON PERSON BUILDING
    MAYBE WE CAN LEARN BY EXAMPLE

    STILL YOUR REAL SECRET ADMIRER!!!;<)

    ReplyDelete