Accepting the Struggle

 

Yesterday afternoon I forced myself to go for a walk around my neighborhood, to get out of the house and move my legs.  I had thirty minutes between work meetings and although I had plenty of things I could do for my job, I also had to do this for myself.  I’ve been working on not putting myself last lately — below work, below family, below everything.  I’ve been writing down personal goals and integrating them into my daily list of tasks.

So:  Time to go outside now.  Not work.  Work can wait.  I walked around densely packed houses, looking around, trying to force myself to see the world around me.  Some days it’s hard for me to look outward because something in my brain tells me to keep looking inside — that inside are the solutions to problems — but I have found that my brain often lies.  Engaging with the world makes me feel better, and feeling fetter helps my energy levels, and having energy is what actually helps me to tackle and solve problems — energy helps me not just to do the things but also to feel good about life while i’m doing them.

I try to describe the experience.  A light gray sky with dark smears tracking across with the wind.  I wonder why the lower altitude clouds are darker today — what phenomenon causes this?  I see a white terrier upright, only his front legs and head visible, looking out of a living room window at me with comical alarm, and I imagine the couch he must be standing on, pet-stained, dirty.  I look at him and he barks twice, then attempts to stare me down as I pass by the house.  A few leaves from the fall blow across the street, remnants from months past, brown and tattered.  I strain my ears to listen and hear the sound of a chainsaw in the distance — someone must be cutting wood, maybe a tree that blew down in the windstorm we had a few weeks ago.

Then my mind tries to put me back into my obligations.  What other shit do I have to do for work before I log off?

I catch myself, resist.  I wonder what this walk would feel like to someone else.  Stephen King said he walks for an hour and change every day.  Four miles.  Or at least he used to, before he got hit by a car and almost died.  I don’t know that he can still do that.  He wouldn’t think about the things to do the way that I do.  He wouldn’t be concerned about his thousand dollar oil bills and his wife isn’t doing In Vitro Fertilization and his place in the world is pretty well established.  He’s not thinking about doing the laundry — there is just about zero chance he does his own — nor his landscaping, or pretty much any other menial task around the house other than an occasional dish.  My best guess is that he thinks about whatever it is that he’s writing, or critiquing, or editing — he thinks about the literary projects he’s working on.

I wonder if it feels the same to him.  I wonder if it feels like work, or it’s just… something he does.  Something to keep him occupied.  I wonder if he’s aware that he does these things merely to keep occupied — he surely doesn’t need more money at this point.

As I’m thinking about this I see a dude emerge from an apartment complex, mid thirties, hat and sweatshirt and orange running shorts that you could see from a mile away.  I remember back to when this dude would be me — before my bad knee and back, when I could go out and put some miles on the legs in the middle of the day.  I used to feel jealous when I saw people running — I used to remember the part of me that would run and feel some kind of hurt that I couldn’t do it anymore — but today that pain is gone, replaced by nothing at all.  Then something makes me remember back to my early twenties, when I lived in San Francisco and I hated my job.

I wanted, back then, more than anything, to quit my job and write.  I walked around the city and tried to describe it to myself so that I could write about it later.  But I’d always forget the details.  I’d sit down with a pencil in the evening, remember two or three things — a gargoyle at the top of a three story building — the seedy looking Mitchell Brothers X-Rated theater on O’Farrell Street — the homeless shelter entrance that smelled like piss — and promptly forget the rest.  What I was good about — what I remembered best — was my internals — what I was thinking about inside of myself.   And back then, just like now, I’d get distracted — lost again in the basic needs of the day.  How will I handle that unruly customer at work?  What do I need to do to prepare for my end of year review with my manager tomorrow?  Bills need to be paid, college loans handled, friends seen and bar tabs settled, new graphics card and phones and CDs to listen to and so on.  I needed the job to live.  Thinking about gargoyles always seemed to be a luxury.

I think about things that are practical — things that will help with the struggle of life.  I remember reading a series of books by Karl Ove Knausgaard — he wrote a six book autobiographical series on his life that he titled My Struggle — a disturbing borrowing of Hitler’s book title — borrowed, though, to make a point:  Everyone’s life is a struggle.  That’s how everyone perceives their life.  The richest of the rich still internally view their day to day life as a struggle.  They have different choices and different problems — but the struggle remains.

Stephen King would struggle with his plots and his characters and pacing and development.  These are the things that pressed in on him most acutely, and he would respond to it.

For some reason, what presses strongest on me are things I associate with survival.  I don’t have the same need to create that he did.  That’s why my brain works differently.  That must be it.  I do need to create, and I do need to write, but it’s not the same — I don’t need to write about other people, or aliens from space, the Tommyknockers or teenaged girls with telekinesis.

I began to wonder why his need was so great and found myself back at home.

In my office, after my thirty minute zoom meeting, I tried to remember the second half of my walk and couldn’t.  Half an hour of peering at pixelated human faces and talking about restoring University services in the proper reverse dependency order after this upcoming’s weekend planned “disaster simulation” outage had removed any trace.

The same thing happened that always happens when I try to look outward — I seem to quickly forget the details, and then start looking in again.

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I get a few things for my wife during the day.  A dozen red roses.  Her favorite candies — chocolate caramels with sea-salt, a bag of gummy bears, a box of rainbow Nerds.  I arrange them on the kitchen table so she’ll see them when she gets home.

We go to dinner and eat a big pretzel, followed by deep fried chicken breast on top of a waffle.  We split a glass of wine.  The booze makes my head foggy and tired.

At home we watch episode 5 of The Last of Us and cuddle.  She’s calm, happy — didn’t have to see her crazy dementia-addled parents yesterday — no drama, nothing to de-rail us from being happy.

this is what i actually want more of.  this is what actually makes me happy.  this is what the daily struggle earns me — sometimes.

At the time it seems worth it.  But then, today, in the morning, when I write about yesterday, that feeling is gone again.  People at work bother me for this and for that and everything is a chore — one big meaningless slog.  It reminds me of a line in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where the main character is talking to someone with an obviously shitty job.  He asks how he likes his job and the answer is “Well.. the hours are great, but the minutes are terrible.”  This is, approximately, how I feel about my own job.  Working from home is great — and most days I’m not overworked.  But the actual work — the minutes — are terrible:  boring, pointless, stupefying.

I want a release from examining this up and down pattern.  Down:  job shittiness, pointlessness, discomfort, stress, financial issues, bills, home repair, physical therapy.  Up:  cuddling, good food, happy wife, lovemaking, a movie, a trip to a museum, Comic-Con, a concert.  Over and over and over again until I die.  I don’t want to look at it anymore.  I want to ride the ride without looking at myself riding the ride.

But I don’t think that this is possible anymore.  I’m so accustomed to the way that I live and think that it’s hard to imagine doing it any other way.

Karl Ove would say that life is a struggle for everybody.  I must accept the struggle of it all.  There are no solutions — not getting rich, not quitting my job, not trying to write, not fixing my knee — nothing.  No matter how many so-called problems I fix, there will be more.  If there are not more, my mind will make more — I will generate the pressure on my own accord, the pressure that forces me to look inward again instead of outward, the pressure that prevents me from engaging in activities that I pretend to want to do — look outward, experience the world, write about it.  I don’t want those things enough.

What I must want, then, is the struggle itself.  There must be something about the internal conflict that I need.