Category Archives: The Good Life

Not too long ago, I invited a friend to a show. “What kind of music is it?” he asked. I didn’t have a great answer, but fumbled my way through an explanation as best I could: “They’re kind of goth-Americana, like alt.county-pop on a bad day. You know, with guitars and a hint of banjo, all layer-caked over intelligent lyrics. The kind of music that might compel one to drink whiskey and be torn as to whether she wanted to dance or cry. Or both.”

I don’t know if this description was helpful.

The friend declined my invite.

But it opens a larger question, about genres and types and labels. How often are you asked–usually by someone you’re getting to know, but there are other circumstances under which this comes up–what sort of music you like? Or maybe the question is more movies or people or books or paint colors, but the query at the heart of them all is the same: what sort of person are you?

I’ve never had an easy time answering these kinds of questions. “It depends…” is where I usually start, with an answer that strings together so many adjectives and caveats as to be near-meaningless.

The real truth of it is that I can fall in love with damn near anything or anyone if it/they are written well or sound right or feel in sync with me. It’s nebulous and variable and nonetheless important for its hard-to-pin-down-ness. You know what I’m talking about.

Which brings us to the slice-of-life genre. It’s broad and vague, and long co-opted by the saccharine Norman Rockwell wannabe types, but its allure holds, for several reasons: one, real and honest are virtues, however badly they’ve been used and abused by hack writers, and nothing else can so quickly get to the heart of a situation as a crystal-clear look at the right moment of it. It’s like life distillation. Two, the longer I live, the more I’m convinced that this is what we are here for–not grand gestures or monumental accomplishments, but rather a life lived well in its particulars, no matter how trivial they may seem to others.

And so it is that I can describe one perfect happiness, even in the face of plans unfinished and dreams unrealized (for there are many ways to happy, just as there are ways to be miserable, and the fact that neither looked like what you thought they would doesn’t make them any less true). Today, that is this:

The sky today is a floor pounded by the feet of a thousand dancers. It is churned, rhythmic, rolling…even though it doesn’t move. It threatens rain, but doesn’t deliver. It is that girlfriend you never quite understood, but couldn’t bring yourself to leave. This sky will hover, dragging its belly over the too-dry land, and it will let fall a few drops of rain, or it won’t. I’ve tempted it by pedaling away from the house without rain gear, by hanging clothes out to dry, and now by settling on the patio with laptop and afternoon coffee, but it will not be provoked. Such are skies, sometimes.

Today, friends I will miss dearly and viscerally gathered around a coffee table laden with candy and pizza and beer for the World Cup final. Vuvuzelas make me hum in spite of myself, and I yell even though I don’t particularly care who wins this game.

A pork shoulder has been cooking since this morning, and the smell is too big for my house to hold. It wafts out the french doors and lingers on the patio, making sure I’ve noticed its richness.

Now the wind picks up, egging the sky on to drop its load of rain and be done with it. Dust and the last few wisps from the cottonwood trees are drawn to the mouth of my coffee mug. They make wee dimples on the liquid’s oily surface while I consider the peach tree, bent horizontal with its bounty. In days, I’ll have more peaches than I know what to do with; today I think about how they will taste and wait.

Today I’ve put away laundry, sold another piece of furniture, finished a sewing project. I haven’t read any more of the book I started, written much besides this bit, or spent more time in the kitchen than it took to put that pig into the crock pot. This is a perfect state of affairs. Because, regardless of how productive I have or have not been, right now I’m in a yard, in the wind, under an almost-rainy sky, and I’m smiling.

I know this much to be true: at the end of it all, maybe all that matters is how often you were able to smile, and make more smiles around you. What sort of person you are matters little; a label isn’t what will make me decide to invite you in for tea.

What kind of life do you like? What kind of life do you live?

Among the many other not-so-small tasks I had to get done on my day “off” was buying a new phone. My cell phone is over four years old–prehistorically ancient by phone standards–held together by electrical tape, with a battery that now holds a charge for maybe half the day (and that’s with my, by normal standards, minimal-to-nonexistent usage). The time had come. For various reasons (some frivolous, some justifiable), I went smartphone. I did some research leading up to this purchase–given that I tend to hang on to phones until pieces of them literally start to fall off, it’s important that I pick one I can live with for the next several years.

All the technological details quickly overwhelmed my (relatively) un-tech-savvy mind, and created some unnecessary fears. Particularly, all the app-this and app-that features quickly intimidated (though the free epocrates app gave me an instant para-geek woody). The idea that my phone could be up to all sort of shenanigans even while seemingly asleep, downloading and updating and battery sucking, kinda creeps me out.

And so I read a lot about adjusting settings and killing apps and general battery protection–after all, sometimes at work the radios just don’t function, and my personal cell is my only, vital link to help, whether I need it to get drug info on an unconscious OD patient, to get PD to my location when a patient who outweighs me by a hundred pounds gets violent, or to get a doc on the line when I need orders to discontinue resuscitation efforts. The bells and whistles don’t mean a whole lot if I can’t keep enough juice to use ‘em.

And what I found translates quite nicely to the rest of my life: if it’s not necessary for your existence right now, turn it off. All that stuff running in the background uses up juice–juice you could be putting into other, more important things, or saving for later.

So often, I drain my own batteries by doing just what a phone might do: I don’t close things, or truly set them aside. They’re still running in the background. That squeaky gerbil wheel of constant worry and preoccupation sitting off in the back of my mind? It might not be front-and-center, but it’s still sapping precious resources, keeping me both from truly solving the problems and from taking respite from them. I’m keeping that stuff in an ever-present limbo. It’s a perverse little self-torture, and a nasty habit I’m trying hard to break.

I can take a lesson from my fancy, new, self-declared “smart” phone: the juice is precious, and should be spent only on those things that truly serve me right now.

Background noise is no woman’s friend, and your batteries are in your care. Adjust your settings accordingly.

An observation: even the things we love to do can sometimes feel like burdens. This generally happens to me when my attitude is all out of whack, jostled from a place of peace and contentment by stress or fear in any of their myriad disguises–overwork, overworry, arbitrary rules, misguided wants. Perspective is frequently the first casualty, and it becomes hard to see the right path out of the muck.

It’s in those times that I completely understand cranky kids–you know the ones: little faces screwed up in a look of intense frustration, giving a curt “No!” to every suggestion. What they’re really saying no to isn’t the particular game or snack or cuddle proffered; it’s a general rejection of how awful they feel, stuck in the echo chamber of yuck.

And breaking out of it is hard.

I’ve always liked the concept of the monkey mind. So concise, so apt, so accurate. The monkey mind may harp on different themes each time, but it’s always insistent and bossy, pushing my mood around to suit its own ends. And it’s always a self-perpetuating phenomenon–the more rein I give, the faster that sucker runs. All that chatter fogs up the windows, and it gets hard to see your way out. And so, like the No! kid, I have the urge to resist everything, because nothing feels right.

In an interview, a cycling local talks about why he rides. Yes, it is about eco this and exercise that, but mostly, he says, it has a lot to do with watching robins fly. That ability to notice and appreciate details only happens when the monkey is quiet. Too much chatter is overthinking, is panic–no wonder we have such an epidemic of anxiety disorders in our culture.

Resisting, saying No! over and over again, feeds the chatter–it becomes one more problem, one more criticism, one more worry in the litany inside my head. Monkey mind can’t be bullied into quiet–it responds to pushback with more push. Monkey mind says, “Who’s gonna make me?” It’s like every badly behaved reality tv star–singleminded, destructive, and oblivious.

The trick is much simpler: Don’t resist. Just do something else. Go where the monkey mind isn’t. It takes surmounting the barricade of your own No!, but once you’re on your bike or on the mat or on a trail, you can start letting all that talk just slide right by.

It seems such a simple lesson, but I have to keep reminding myself that what serves me best is not feeding the monkey. It’s turning aside, letting go, regaining my bearing. Remembering which is the true burden, and which the joy.