A Worthwhile Endeavor

Way back when my husband and I were still dating, his sister gave me a calendar featuring beautiful photographs and inspirational quotes. I’m pretty sure it was a generic item she’d bought to have on hand in case she received a present from someone (in this case, me) she hadn’t purchased anything for specifically. Regardless, I quite liked the calendar, especially a page with a quote pulled, it turns out, from Annie Dillard’s book The Writing Life. The little profundity excerpted on that calendar was “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

One weekend afternoon, also quite a few years ago now, while my husband and I toiled away at the second of the three old houses we’ve owned, my father stopped by to check on our progress. At the time, we also owned the first house we’d purchased, the one we were actually living in, and that wasn’t very far along either in what needed doing to it. The labor and the responsibility of these undertakings consumed us, to the exclusion of so much else, and we were feeling daunted and worn out. We were drained—physically, mentally, and financially.

As I showed my dad around, I complained about our fatigue and overwhelm at the prospect of all the work we still faced. In reply, he simply complimented the good job we were doing on the house and said with calm certainty, “It’s who you are now.”

Ah. How we were spending our days—or, in fact, our evenings and weekends—was how we were spending our lives. And it can be said that how you spend your life, at both the micro and the macro level, is who you are. The little pixels form the pictures in the photo album of your life. Also, actions speak louder than words. And our actions were telling the world that we were weekend warriors in old-house renovation, or in other words, gluttons for punishment.

Choosing to stake our claims in the buildings and neighborhoods we did had perfectly rational justifications, but the courses of action we took were decided also in part by metaphorically closing our eyes and following a feeling. Sometimes you’re just drawn to what you’re drawn to.

The discord comes when you hear whispering in the wings, or plainly spoken comments, second-guessing how you choose to spend your days—that is, your life. Voices questioning whether what you’re doing is even worthwhile.

Sometimes the doubters mean well, sometimes they don’t; either way, the cacophony can be hard to tune out. Especially when it’s coming from your own head. It’s like when you can’t decide whether what you have on your to-do list is really the best use of a Saturday. Then scale that up over a lifetime.

My husband is continually bewildered and irritated by my ability to conclude midway through just about anything I do that maybe I shouldn’t be doing it after all. The bewilderment and irritation tend to get ratcheted up a notch when whatever it is that I’m questioning—a small task or a larger life choice or anything in-between—also involves him. This veers into the territory of my inclination to be critical of things, which I think is not at all the same as being negative, though I know others, including my husband, have at times disagreed.

Perhaps it’s just some strange manifestation of commitment phobia, but I encounter this quandary almost daily. To look at me, you wouldn’t probably guess that I’m a hand-wringer, but I think maybe I am. Consider the stakes, though: “How you spend your days is, in fact, how you spend your life.” No pressure.

It’s unsurprising that some of this second-guessing and hand-wringing happens within the sphere of house and home and garden, where a lot of uncompensated labor occurs.

For instance, I always tell myself that I should spend less time cooking and baking for personal consumption and more time doing something that will, let’s say, earn income. I’ve always felt the pull of the kitchen, though, and of necessity I spend a lot of time there: my husband and son and I all like to eat well, so we cook. For a single person or a couple, eating out might be fine, and perhaps even more cost-effective than preparing food at home; but for a family, including a small one like ours, eating from one’s own kitchen tends to be the least expensive way to go, not to mention the healthiest. My husband and my son also cook and bake, but in our home I’m primarily the one preparing family dinners.

Even before my son came along, often the first thing I would do after coming home from work was head to the kitchen and, say, chop vegetables or make a cake. Or both. It’s not as if I decided to: I would just drift into the kitchen. I make no claims about my abilities as a cook, but clearly it’s something I like to do, so I should probably stop telling myself that I ought to be doing something else.

People who know me also know that I’m crazy about gardening. My son jokes that if I had a composting toilet in our yard, I probably wouldn’t even need to come inside all summer. I find gardening so enjoyable, I even pull weeds in other people’s gardens. I can’t help myself. When my family and I ride on bike paths, I almost invariably lag behind, slowed down by my attempts to identify the trees and wildflowers we’re passing. I feel compelled to garden, in whatever form it’s available to me at a given time. And it’s how I identify myself: I am a gardener.

But when it comes to a pastime that has no end-game, even I, the gardening addict who walks around with leaves and sticks caught in my hair and who has been known to plant trees by the light of my cellphone, can recognize that I’ve chosen to stay out too long and maybe have other things I ought to be doing.

Perhaps I’m a wannabe homesteader, but knitting is another hobby I’ve taken up, and I happily muddle my way through the process of constructing usable or wearable items. I’m someone who tends toward conscientiousness, even perfectionism, and by nature I’m easily frustrated. Yet I find myself oddly unconcerned with the disproportionate amount of time I spend undoing and then clumsily correcting my creations. I can’t stress enough how uncharacteristic my contentment is with the rather imperfect end results.

My sewing skills are equally questionable, but I was proud when I produced my first quilts, back in my twenties. Never mind that the seams didn’t match up like they were supposed to, or that my older brother asked me one day as I was laying squares of fabric out on the floor whether I should instead be putting a bit more elbow grease into securing a better job than I had at the time. A few years ago I went through a phase where I made knotted rugs, and their lumpy, misshapen homeliness doesn’t bother me anywhere near as much as it ought to. Evidently this inclination to spend my time, which I consider precious, engaged in this sort of inefficient, fumbling creativity, is also who I am. No use in denying it.

And so that is the refrain. These things I do—these efforts and activities and undertakings and endeavors—both make me who I am and are a manifestation of who I am. It’s a continuous feedback loop.

Of course, I also worry constantly that none of this is what I am supposed to be doing, so obviously what I am as well is a worrier.

I have always been a reader, and since early adolescence, I’ve also written. At first I wrote in purpose-made diaries and decorative journals, then in run-of-the-mill composition notebooks, and eventually in a utilitarian folder on my home computer. These bits of writing, whether fully developed pieces or the electronic equivalent of thoughts scribbled on a scrap of paper, formed the basis for projects I had no stated aim of pursuing. Until, that is, my subconscious worked its way into my consciousness and my stack of completed manuscripts started piling up. And so it is that without ever actively deciding to, I became someone who writes and, thus, a writer. But ask any writer who is working on something with seemingly no prospect of publication if they have ever questioned whether they’re wasting their time. Also ask them whether they continued anyway.

One of my brothers dropped out of college with, I believe, a year to go, and when he was in his thirties he talked about finishing his degree and becoming a social studies teacher, a profession that runs in our family. But I’m fairly certain my brother has read maybe one or two books in his entire adult life, and if I recall, they were fairly lowbrow.

He’s verbally adept, very well-spoken, and really clever with a turn of phrase or a joke. But he isn’t a reader. Some people aren’t. It strikes me, though, that social studies teachers should be.

When he was in his twenties and employed at a restaurant, my brother talked about wanting to be a woodworker, then set about learning how to be one. Talented and self-taught, he found gigs in the field of home construction and high-end renovation. In more recent years he apprenticed himself to a friend and learned how to make knives. He once showed me a knife he’d made, and it was a work of art. Working with his hands is what he’s drawn to by gut instinct, and he’s really good at it.

A friend I knew for roughly twenty-five years reached a point of personal crisis and, sadly, ended her life. The last time I saw her, we spoke about what life might hold for her post-retirement, which she only recently was, and now that her son was halfway through his second year of college and it had become apparent that he would not be returning home. In prior conversations about future plans, she had said she could see herself working with plants. I remember looking around at her beautiful but decidedly au naturel property, a flicker of doubt entering my thoughts. She considered herself a spiritual person, I believe, and connected with nature, at least the pleasant, leafy variety of nature that most of us like. But the thing is, she had never cultivated a garden. As far as I know, she didn’t ever dig in the dirt. So she probably wouldn’t really have chosen to work with plants. Maybe it was who she would have liked to have been or who she thought she was supposed to have wanted to be. Either way, in the last twenty years of her life she hadn’t lived in a city and could certainly have gardened if she’d wanted to. But she didn’t. Apparently, it’s just not who she was.

Not that we can’t burst through the walls of our own familiar places and reinvent ourselves, or make choices others would have us not make. Of course we can. My friend could have gardened, even in some small, easily managed way, but the thing is, other occupations and passions drew her attention and her energies. My brother could have pursued a career in teaching, but it’s not what he wanted. Not really.

We all live our lives constrained in certain ways. I recognize that some people bear burdens that may leave them, or seems like it leaves them, with less freedom to choose their own destiny. For some people, the dinner menu has an excellent selection, and price is no object; for others, the eggs and toast special is all that’s on offer. Wealth does often seem to bring people the luxury of a self-directed personal journey, of self-actualization, of fulfillment, along with advisors to help them. Maybe the rest of us, the down where things trickle to, tend to be more reactive to the requirements and boundaries imposed by the circumstances of our lives.

What I’m talking about is something else. Acting on instinct when you feel paralyzed by the world of possibilities in front of you. Not forcing what isn’t working. Following a path and not knowing that you walked it until you’ve turned around to assess how you got to where you’re standing, and then appreciating how far you’ve traveled. Maybe, accepting where you are and who you are is the other part of that journey, until you start walking again. Or before you can start walking again.

Some people know from a young age what they want to be and what they want to do in life. Although maybe there’s no wanting about it; they know who they will be and what they will do. The contours of their personhood are drawn distinctly in permanent marker; the lines of their path are clear. If you’ve ever seen the film It’s a Wonderful Life, you may remember that a very young Mary whispers in George’s deaf left ear, “George Bailey, I’ll love you till the day I die.” And she marries him, because the force of her benevolent will is guiding that ship. Poor George on the other hand: he can’t be who he wants to be. It’s as if his feet are planted in concrete. Though of course George is exactly the person he wants to be. Sort of.

We’re told that the things we don’t do are the only things we’ll regret. We’re told to make choices, even if it turns out that they’re the wrong ones. Action in some form, usually in bold strokes, is necessary; inaction, deadly. I agree with all of it. How we should come to that action is open to interpretation, however. You’re welcome to your life plan. I’m just going to meander over here and maybe knit a scarf, plant some flower seeds, read a book and also write one, and see what happens.

Once, as a young adult, I was waiting for the eighty-something picture framer in my neighborhood to write up a bill for some work he had done for me. He was taking his sweet time, so while I waited I read brochures and booklets he had around his shop. He interrupted his calculations to say, “Boy, you’re interested in everything, aren’t you.” I have often thought that one sentence sums up my life’s dilemma.

When I was in college, I had a friend who told me I was doomed to be a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. For sure, I am a dabbler. If pushed, I might even say a ditherer. Indecision remains an issue for me, because I worry about making the wrong choice. You don’t want to be next in line when I’m ordering a meal.

Even when I settled on a career, what I selected was the option not to commit: the life of a freelancer, with short-term projects possessing clear starting points and endpoints. Having choice, retaining a sense of possibility, matters to me I guess.

But that’s my conscious life at play. In autopilot I’m more decisive. This does result in cognitive dissonance.

Here I am, though, at or perhaps past the halfway mark in my life—a startling thought for sure. Have I homed in on what and who I want to be? I think I have. But the pictures in the mental photo album of my life tend to get fuzzy around the edges if I don’t consciously and effortfully recall—for my own benefit, since who else would this litany be for?—what I’ve done, all that I continue to do, what I’ve not yet done, and what I have no desire to do. Or, expressed in another way, who I’ve been, who I might prefer to be instead, and who I hope I never become.

Evidently my first-grade teacher predicted that I would be the first woman president of the United States. I missed the mark on that, though I’d like to point out that it isn’t what I was aiming for. I have strived for a life of accomplishment and fulfillment, and I don’t necessarily feel like I’ve missed out because I’m not, for instance, a billionaire. Having reached the age I’ve reached, I’ve accumulated a track record of choices. Whether conscious or unconscious, rational or irrational or nonrational, there they are, shaping my life.

And there is a discernible pattern to those choices. For example, not one old house, but three.

This point was driven home to me when, a few weekends ago, I spent a day and a half culling the papers, books, and miscellaneous other objects stored in a desk I am selling and therefore needed to empty. It was the organizing equivalent of having a deadline. In the course of this task, I must have come to some understanding that my subconscious hasn’t shared with me yet, because these possessions—definitely an overblown term for some of what was in there—ended up being pretty handily sorted. They fell into two categories: a reminder of what has come before, or helpful to what I will find myself doing today, tomorrow, and the days after that. And during this process of elimination, from which I eventually emerged, I found in one of the desk drawers my New Year’s resolutions from ten winters ago. Here, again, a pattern: I discovered that my list hasn’t changed.