Do

I don’t want to do anything. But the kind of nothing I want to do isn’t sitting on a couch in mental and physical arrestment. My kind of nothing involves a different kind of stasis, kind of like that of the characters in Alien(s) as they zoom through space blissfully and prolongedly asleep. While I enjoy and many times yearn to run and jump and throw and swim and pedal and occasionally kick, my favorite kinds of doing involve more the mental than the physical. It’s 11:00 am on a Saturday morning right now. I’m in my heaven, sitting at a desk writing this, bottle of water and leftover pizza next to the computer, the turtle to my right keeping an eye on me, church bells chiming somewhere in my neighborhood, and the passing of cars and conversations and various other external stimuli floating up through the open window as evidence that others are doing in ways different than I right now and in ways different than I’d ordinarily choose. If I had that choice.

In this late-20s/early-30s epoch of my life, the very definitions of things are changing and the way in which I interact with the world has morphed from PHIL-time and then a little bit of Taking Care of Responsibility-time to RESPONSIBILITY-time and little blips and beeps and boops of phil-TIME when I can get them. It’s like my life has become that of a lowly urban peasant in the USSR, and where Time is a nice slice of beef. It’s only available sometimes, and it feels even rarer than sometimes, and when you do get it you agonize and worry about making the most of it, of cooking that beef just right, with the perfect ingredients, the perfect complimentary foods on the same plate, and then you start to think about the wine or the hearty beer you’d like to enjoy with your nice slice of beef, and before you know it your beef has spoiled or if you’re lucky enough to pull yourself out of the maelstrom of worry and agony, you just end up throwing the damn thing in a pan and cooking it till edible and not enjoying your nice slice of beef because the worry and the agony stole all the fun out of it. Becoming an adult sucks.

            As I think about what exactly my point is here and desperately try to rescue the idea in my head from just mere Dear Diary boo-hoo waste of my time writing, I begin to think back, to trace the source of what has become a real mental pain-in-the-butt, a nagging infection of every second of my day; in short, a despairing and driven desire to do, and a seeming complete inability to. I’m hoping this problem is universal, that something about life kicks us all down and holds us there until the time passes or the opportunity is truly squandered. I think what I’m getting at is not a mere complaint about the busyness of adult life, but rather a piece of self-reflection that maybe had to go through different stages of adult life before revealing itself. In a word, learning.

            When I was around 16, when my friends of the same age or slightly older started driving, I started going out almost every night. My parents’ willingness to go along with this surprised me, especially on school nights, and I remember thinking exactly this: ‘Why do people go out so much?’ I wanted to stay home. This was the time of my life when I started to discover good literature and I devoured the classics. I began writing, and somewhere deep inside I vaguely understood that a writer needs time to think; he needs time to climb into his space bed, close the hatch, and just put the brain and heart and soul on autopilot. To the outsider, it looks like stasis. It looks like laziness. But to the writer, it’s the same type of freedom one feels during and after a good run or swim. The way one feels after giving their all on the court or the field, that deep soul-level satisfaction that can only be obtained by doing. I think it’s taken me a long time to figure out there’s different forms of doing and what exactly my form is.

            Which brings me to some sort of conclusion, but it’s that sort that isn’t a conclusion at all. The answer is to do, to not fret or worry or try to make everything perfect. In a perfect world, I’d have endless hours to think and write and dream and do. But it’s not a perfect world (and it still amazes me how much I have to remind myself that, even though the evidence of such bombards me constantly, especially the evidence I produce personally), and even though I have a better shot at a perfect world than most – summers off – experience has taught me that when you don’t actively do what you want, other things will creep in and actively do for you. And while those things are fun and bestow life experience, they are in themselves their own kind of stasis, a space bed on the wrong ship, because you want to be on the right spaceship, the one that leads to happiness and fulfillment and not pure anger at the unfairness of all of this.