Back to Normal?
I want to explore for a moment why everything feels like it’s back to normal today. First of all, I’m not entirely sure what normal means anymore. For many years (1976 – 2019…43 years) normal meant getting up and being consumed by work for most of the day, any and every day, and then squeezing in other life activities like family and friends whenever and wherever they fit around the edges. Yesterday, my old friend Arthur messaged me and ridiculed me for suggesting that I was retired, since he at 92 thinks just writing these blog stories feels too much like work to him. So, to start my review of my new normal, I will rebut Arthur’s comments. By the way, Arthur protests that he is not being contrary towards me with these comments, but I would suggest that one of Arthur’s most endearing traits is that his age he is still as feisty as ever and never gives people like me one inch of slack when we don’t deserve it.
My new normal is to begin with my sleep status. In the bad old days, when I got up at 4am to make a train or a flight, sleep was an afterthought, something that could be made up for on the weekends if necessary. Now I realize that all things start and end with sufficient sleep, and yet, with age, there are more things standing between me and a good night’s sleep than ever before. Mostly those are aches and pains, but occasionally they are things weighing on my mind, ranging from family issues to worldly issues. There was even one particular six month stretch when I stayed awake worrying about incarceration (the one time I used sleep aides during the second half of 2007 when CNBC was on the warpath to find a scapegoat for the impending Global Financial Crisis and I was in their gunsights). This morning my CPAP machine informed me that I slept 8 hours and 10 minutes uninterrupted…by anything. That’s a good start to a new normal.
Once I’ve established my sleep status, one way or the other, I am free to sit and write a story about whatever occurs to me based on what’s happening around me or in the world at large. This is quite different from journaling because it is not intended to be a comprehensive review of my day or my thoughts on the day, but rather the exploration of things that I find so interesting or so puzzling as to warrant my running down whatever rabbit holes it all creates in my consciousness. I think of this as a mental calisthenics, which is to say, using the weight of my own thoughts to force me to exercise whatever I have left of my cognitive abilities, both right and left brain. I cannot call any of my writing of this sort work. It is distinctly not work, Arthur. It may be the purest form of leisure that I know. When I think about why I find it so liberating, I have an answer, which just this moment came to me. When you have spent your entire adult life (since age 16) above 300 pounds (except for one brief summer of extreme outdoor work during college in 1974, when I got down to 270), doing something that only requires pushing around words rather than my not inconsequential bulk, feels like the closest thing to freedom that I know. I can go anywhere I want, as fast and furiously as I choose, and as agile as an Olympic athlete, spinning on the tip of my toes. I am the Walter Mitty of the blogging world.
Now I must face the rest of my day. On a routine day I have a visit to the gym or to a stretch session. I go for a stretch twice a week and I should go to the gym at least five times a week, but that has fallen by the wayside and is probably the cause of some of my aches and pains. Today I have gone to the gym because my daughter, the marathoner, needs to stay in training, so I did my swimming laps for the first time in a few weeks. It felt good and I think taking her every day for the next 3+ weeks might just get me in the habit…I hope.
In the past month I have put in over 120 hours of work on my latest expert witness case. That’s a lot of time no matter how you slice it. We were on a bit of a forced march for a hearing scheduled for mid-August, but I was just informed that the hearing has been pushed three months to mid-November. That takes considerable heat off and while I have already produced and sent the second draft of my report, my guess is that the lawyers will now feel they can take their time in editing and tweaking it. It means I will not have to fly to New York as I expected in August, but will most likely have to do so in November. It sounds like that might be an opportunity to have a somewhat extended stay in New York with Kim, a little earlier than our normal holiday visit in early December. We’ll see how that goes once the hearing dates get set in stone. What that also means is that things will be calmer this summer than I originally predicted…or so I thought. Out of the blue, I was asked to take on yet another case and have a conversation with the lawyers about it on Monday. How does that happen? Just as one case slows another one suddenly rushes in to take its place. I suppose I should be happy about that and feel honored that my reputation as an expert allows that to happen, but its still a head scratcher.
Normal for me these days, now that I have stopped teaching, is to spend my time doing this case work when its on my plate. And right now I have nine cases on my plate, several of which can heat up and chew up hours at any moment, and most will come back to life to some degrees whenever the gods of the judicial system say so. Otherwise, I find travel and family/friend gathering trips to fill our dance card and work the garden and the property in the gaps. My new normal is very much centered around this hilltop and trying every day to enjoy what we have and not worry about getting any more or even necessarily making the most of what we have. In fact, Kim and I are both of a mind to start deescalating our lives not ramping it up. As as example, we have friends more or less our age that are thinking of building a new house on a higher piece of ground two or three lots away from where they are now. They would be staying in the neighborhood, but just making a slightly higher hilltop for themselves. Note that they built their current house to their exact desires, so it would be hard to say they want something that fits them better. There is a time in my life when that would have struck me as perfectly normal, but not now. Now it strikes me as very abnormal. Bigger or better just isn’t something we aspire to any more. We have plans to downscale our Mercedes that Kim drives (we have had this style of big Mercedes SUV since 2007, so for 17 years through 9 different cars for various and sundry reasons), and drop down into a Subaru SUV. That and my truck is about as normal for our age group as it comes.
Even with travel, the new normal for us is to do less of it if we can. That sounds funny since there is nothing technically stopping us from doing that, but it has been slow to happen. I’m not talking about family gatherings, but rather sightseeing-type travel. I truly believe we will bring that down to once a year starting in 2025. When it comes right down to it, who wants to be normal anyway?