Wandering Baseline

(Not to be confused with a wandering bass line, as might happen if Sara Lee and Les Claypool were to play drinking games.)

That dictionary sitting over on the bookshelf, full of irrefutabilities and specificities and Scrabble-argument-deciders, it thinks it knows what’s what. And it certainly makes a persuasive argument, with its thin pages and imposing size and name-dropping cover. It’s an important, multi-use tool. Use it to boost someone up to the adults’ table, to press flowers, to kill especially large spiders. Use it to make sense of something when context just ain’t helping. Use it for those I-think-I-know-what-that-means-but-I’m-not-quite-sure moments. Most of all, use it–at least occasionally–as a mirror to check yo’ self. You know, before the proverbial wrecking yo’ self happens.

What I mean to say is, despite what that hallowed tome would lead you to believe, our definitions creep. Meanings creep. The job I mean to get done with certain words or terms might not be completed, because I keep saying “hammer” when what I really need is a shovel. It happens gradually, which makes it all the more difficult to catch. Or talk about. Or see in yourself.

Case in point: “busy” is a word much-abused ’round these parts. Every time that proverbial plate gets more loaded onto it than it’s had before, my personal “busy” baseline gets shifted farther into the red. So later, when I’m just scrambling but not quite up to my eyeballs, or when I’ve got ten things on my to-do list instead of fourteen, I have a hard time using the b-word. My personal definition of busy no longer jives with Webster’s (or even reality, as at least one member of this household would argue).

Fine. But what comes next is crucial: what do you do with your new baseline? Normal creeps–it’s just something it does. Ask your grandparents if you don’t believe me. But when Square One takes up residence in a bad neighborhood, it might be time to trip the reset button. When the new normal isn’t treating you quite right, take a fresh reading and find true north all over again.

But anyone who’s ever quit smoking or changed her diet or taken up running knows how much effort it takes to alter day-to-day behavior. It’s funny: “bad” habits creep in without any work at all; “good” habits have to be pried out of bed every morning, bleary-eyed and cranky.

I’ve tried to fool myself with the labels–you know, call the “bad” habits “good” and the “good” habits “bad”–but I’m smarter than myself. I’ve tried the tough love approach, emotionally self-flagellating when every last item on the to-do list doesn’t get crossed off.

None of this works, not for long.

Right now, I’m going with patience instead of guilt-tripping. Call it self-compassion, or selfish generosity. I’m riding that wandering baseline like a wave, being rocked on the up and down and ebb and flow, not thrashing about and getting water up my nose. Sometimes you’re the windshield, as the song goes, and sometimes you’re the bug. Sometimes you are a prodigious fount of work, writing page after page, staggered by your own way with words and still getting the housecleaning done. Sometimes your fingers can’t take the feel of the keyboard or the heft of a pen, and so you take a nap or watch Law & Order reruns or pick your bellybutton lint. Being in the trough’s okay, so long as you ride that next wave up and outta there.

Inertia is the tool of the monkeymind–the crazy-overwhelmed feelings can build and build and build until you derail them, just like the bellybutton-lint-picking days can stretch into months if you don’t put your fingers to other tasks–but you can make it work for you. Nothing about Newton’s first law of motion says that the force that changes things has to be force-ful. Just a nudge can do it.

Don’t like your definition of “busy”? “Productive”? “Worthwhile”? “Can” and “can’t”? “Should”? Lean the other way. Push off of something if you have to. Change your direction; change your definition.