Grandma's absolutely perfect lovely morning

Wake up 8:23. A good nine hours of sleep. Everyone should have that in the winter. Make coffee, happy that there is nothing on the calendar. Move thoughts away from Things To Do as they pop up. I might stay in all day, I might not do a thing. The weather on my home page has a cute little graphic for freezing rain. I start checking e-mail. Then Tom's up.

Go into kitchen, a long discussion of whether to buy an extended warranty on the new TV. Tom has researched the consumer experience with this thing. We do an informal risk/benefit analysis and decide not to. At one time we would have been reactive and contentious about it, him always wanting insurance, me always arguing risk. It's good to get old with someone and get past those things.

While we talk I am knitting - finishing a Christmas present, in fact. I reaffirm the research that says there's no such thing as multi-tasking, that you can only think about one thing at a time. In this case, it is the knitting that suffers. However, I am used to that, and the beautiful textured yarn hides mistakes. There's a metaphor for you.

Tom is doing his initial scan of the New York Times. He tells me about the history of Haiti. Founded by escaped slaves, a French colony. All the trees cut down for hardwood by the French. We comment on how the French saw Haiti as some other world, took what they wanted with no imagination that it affected the planet they lived on. Utterly dualistic thinking: Us/them. Avatar.

I read aloud a bit about grasping and clinging from my current book, Zen Miracles. Brenda Shoshanna, who is a psychologist as well as a long-time Zen practitioner, invents major exercises. She isn't kidding. Here's the one I want to do next, which is titled "What We Cling To:"

Make a list of those things in your life you are greatly attached to. Stop and look it over, see what purpose they serve for you. What would happen if you let go of one of them? Each day this week, let go of one, just for the day. See how it feels. You may be surprised.

I'm going to meditate before I start it. It is 10:45, a good time of day for me to meditate or do other mental work. Some stretching first, adapted from yoga. Just remembered - health club today. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. We're trying to set a schedule. Should put it on the kitchen calendar.

Meditate. I am learning to count each breath mentally at the bottom of the exhale. Aitken recommends counting as a way to “tidy your desk.” Don’t evaluate your meditation Daniel once told me, so I won’t.

11:32. Go through box of things to do and pull out two fun things, a coupon from Banyan Botanicals and a free subscription to Bon Appetit, which I got for being foolish enough to buy their big cookbook about easy fresh food. Easy, ha. Still, I like getting a magazine like that, and sometimes it inspires me. I pass through some thought traps, as there are other To-do’s in that box. But I remind myself I am taking the morning off.

12:03. Time to get dressed and go to health club. Do a Shud. Will have to proof and post this later.
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The freezing rain never developed. We are supposed to get the January thaw this weekend, temperatures up near 50, and sunshine. That always feels like a blessing.

How I Cleaned up This Mess, Part 2.

Well, here it is, the exercise I found in Brenda Shoshanna's Zen Miracles:

Enjoy persevering at something. Pick one activity that requires a great deal of perseverance and do it for a designated amount of time every day this week. Whether or not you are in the mood to do it, do it anyway. When the time is over, put it down. Then pick it up the next day. See what happens as a result of this to you, and to the activity. (p. 45)

At the beginning I did something Dr. Shoshanna didn't talk about - I defined the task more carefully. You learn to do this in management by objectives, and in my case, in working with classroom curricula. A task like "clean up this mess" is too amorphous. Rather automatically I made it specific: "Get this stuff off my study floor and stored properly."

Another thing I did that I think was important was bite off a really small amount of time. I know myself. I wouldn't do an hour a day. Even half an hour felt like too much, felt like a burden. Fifteen minutes is enough time for me to waste time. I vowed to work only ten minutes a day. Anyone can do that, I thought. That turned out to be good. Inbetween work sessions I found myself planning just how I would handle the next box.

What an amazing amount I accomplished in a total of only an hour, split into ten-minute intervals. I sorted huge boxes of photographs into Tom's and J's, and a small box of unknowns that can be examined at leisure some time. These boxes are marked and stored where they ought to be. I collected our old semi-functional slide projectors and cassettes and gave them to Cat Welfare, where they may appeal to someone who practices archaic photography. The study floor is clean. Basically, the mess as I defined it is cleaned up.

Here's the interesting thing that happened the first day: I got so much momentum going I really didn't want to stop. But I looked at the book, which said to stop when the time was over, and I did. That gave me momentum for the next time - I knew what I was about to do. Each time I found myself making quick decisions, not wasting time, which would have been very easy to do with things of sentimental interest like photographs. But I was clear in my own mind that I was not scrapbooking or figuring out who was in a photograph just now, none of that. I was getting those boxes off my study floor.

As I worked, many other projects occurred to me, and I actually did a couple of them. Gave all the houseplants what they needed, good locations, fertilizer, cleaned them up. Took this year's dead outdoor plants into the garage. Got caught up on the recycle. I saw that the "messes" I worry about, in closets and the laundry room and the garage, are just separate organizing tasks, not so important. Happily for me, what I see as disorder doesn't bother Tom at all. I happen to like my socks folded a certain way in the drawer. That's just a preference. It is my preference, though, and I learned more about that as I worked. I noticed that my yen for neatness fits into that part of my heritage that is German; I remembered how my mother cleaned, and how my father kept the house up immaculately. How my brother always kept his house spotless, what a good housekeeper my sister has always been. This is something I don't need to rebel against.

Doing this exercise worked on a much larger scale for me. Toward the end of the week the thought popped into my head, I shouldn't be putting all this energy into organizing stuff - I should be doing this with my work. My writing, that is, my work as a poet and writer publishing beyond this blog. I thought, I've been making way too much of this household thing. It's just stuff. In other words, worrying about it was functioning as a distraction from something more important in my life.

Just at this point I came across a breathtaking poem by Matthew Dickman via a friend's blog. Then the friend surprised me with Dickman's new book. I spontaneously decided to read one of Dickman's poems every day. I had a new project, a very easy one, and one that is leading me out into the world of contemporary poetry. Sometimes it seems as though the universe is watching, and has decided to do something nice for you.