Waiting for Enlightenment
Life is funny sometimes. Today is the the day before the much awaited arrival of my granddaughters for their Spring Break week-long visit. It has been five years since they were last here. Evelyn was one and Charlotte was four. I think it’s fair to say that this will, for all intents and purposes, be seeing Casa Moonstruck for the first time. Naturally, we’ve seen the girls many times in New York and even in other venues, but not out here. I feel as though everything I have done to the property since we moved here full time two and a half years ago, has been for them. I started with the Games Area with its mini-golf, bocci ball, horseshoes, disc golf, and cornhole. I then moved on to creating the Cecil Garden with its colorful flowers and twelve bonsai trees. That allowed me to clean up the back of the garage and find the perfect boulder crack to hide a little fairy village in. What started as a mysterious village with no people, has turned into a high-density gnome depot. At last count, there were somewhere near 20 farmyard animals and an equal number of gnomes running around. The bonsai club got a second chapter on the patio when I replanted it from top to bottom (except for the Madagascar Bottle Tree or Bilibao Tree). There I positioned an added dozen bonsai for the patio knoll. And all of that was before I set foot on the back hillside.
The back hillside remains a work in progress, but already there is a rose garden terrace, a Bison Boulder, a Joshua Tree statue, a bounding bighorn sheep, a giant Mexican Rooster, a Hobbit House with a Boulder Mouth of Truth, and something I am calling a Celtic Altar, for lack of a better description. The point is that I just keep adding to my creation. I have sculpted paths hither and yon, placing seven benches at strategic rest spots. I have planted something in the area of 500 plants on that hillside and added five irrigation zones to feed the beast. All this gardening a project work I do for pleasure, but it all leaves me waiting for my granddaughters to enjoy it.
The older we get, the more we spend our time waiting for something. The truth is that none of wants to admit what is waiting for us, so we convince ourselves that it is us that is doing the waiting. While I wait I am determined to make something of the time. This is less because of any need to be productive and more because I hate to waste whatever talents I have by choosing to be irrelevant. I find it hard to believe that anyone finds it rewarding to just wake up every morning for the purpose of existing for that day. That may be a good line of thought because it makes me want to do something, but I must admit that it may also be less than ideal because life is wonderful thing and just breathing in and out and enjoying one’s presence has a certain reward to it as well. But the verb to live implies to me the act of doing something. Even if it as little as a calm and pleasant walk or the penning of some random thoughts into prose or poetry, the act of doing strikes me as the act of living.
I am clearly torn because to be at peace or to Rest In Peace implies a more static state than living, and attaining peace is supposed to be a goal we all strive towards. I think the way I delineate thee two concepts of living and being at peace is that I want to be worry free and thus at peace, but alive and doing something that brings me pleasure. Don’t get me wrong, I see lots of value in resting. The reason I have fourteen benches front and back on this property is so that I can attain them and rest on them, looking out over my back hillside creation or my front garden and play area. In many ways, I am finding retirement as a constant tug-of-war between the desires to be in motion and at rest. Some of my most agonizing moments are the moment I decide to return to action from a pleasant state of rest. Muscles tense and soreness is instantly remembered as I stand and start to move. I know I should move, but it is so much more pleasant to submit to inertia. But my physics training also reminds me that inertia has the same impact on an object in motion as it has on an object at rest. An object in motion tends to stay in motion, so I count on that as I get up to motivate me to move. Some people (for instance my old friend Handy Brad) are trained not to submit to the temptation of rest and he chooses to not sit so that he does not suffer that struggle to once again rise and get back into motion. I would say he is active inertia-prone where I consider myself to be static inertia-prone.
This may seem like a silly issue to ponder, but I think it is a universal momentary dilemma we all face every day and that alone makes it worth contemplating. I will go so far as to say that I prefer to favor frequent rest, not only for its sedentary pleasure, but because it keeps me able to stay active longer. I know that when I am on a forced march with some work on the hillside, I can find myself wearing myself down to the point where I must drag myself uphill one last time and drag myself indoors to go sit in a hot shower or go out into a hot tub to soak. As satisfying as that warm restful news may seem, I think of myself as having managed my work sub-optimally if that occurs. I have taken work too far and worn myself into a stasis that is less healthy than one I can declare with greater comfort. I know there is a theory of physiological exercise that suggests reaching failure rate is a good thing, but I have never felt that way. Getting yourself bone-tired does not leave me invigorated, it leaves me exhausted. I see little value in a state of exhaustion.
Getting up after a rest is a little bit of a cattle prod to my body. The objective of a cattle prod is to spur the cow to action without hurting it. That is how I feel about taking my rest breaks. They remind me of why I work. I work to rest. By the same token, I suppose I can say that I rest to work. And there you have it. Eat to live and live to eat. Rest to work and work to rest. I want to rest and I want to work and I want to do them in some degree of balance that keeps me able to enjoy work and enjoy rest. Some who read this will think that this is just one massive rationalization by me to justify my sedentary preferences. You may be right, but I choose not to think of it that way.
I have always thought that the goal of life is enjoyment. I say of my children that all I want of them is that be happy. Happiness came to me most through accomplishment, but that may or may not be the case for others. Now, happiness is a calming rest and what makes my rest so worthwhile and happy is the fact that it is a rest from something, most often work of some sort. In some ways, this is totally logical that someone who values accomplishment would devolve to valuing rest. I rest to admire my accomplishments and I accomplish things to allow myself the ability to sit back and admire them. That all makes me think that as I sit here anxiously awaiting the arrival of my granddaughters, I am waiting for enlightenment. I used to get it through accomplishment and now I get it through rest. Makes perfect sense to me.