In the fifth week of the lockdown, I began to assess my routine and found it to have tyrannical tendencies. In loose terms, it worked pretty well: each day, I woke up, exercised, ate breakfast, and worked (with breaks for lunch and short bouts of relaxation or existential despair). After work, I ate dinner, watched television, read, and played guitar before going to sleep. None of these activities were tied to a particular time of day: it didn't matter if I started work at 9:00 or 9:30 or 10:00. As long as I finished the work, I could be flexible. There was enough time to do chores and play with the cats. Nevertheless, I felt oddly overwhelmed, which made no sense given that I wasn't going anywhere. I tried to remember my life in early March and for the approximately twenty years leading up to that point, during which period I regularly took the subway downtown two to five times a week to my office. I remembered when my current job had given me the option to commute fewer days a week, and how nice it had felt to cut back on the commute -- this during the 'Summer of Hell' era of the MTA -- and yet here I was, with the commute now entirely eliminated, feeling burdened by responsibilities I had apparently handled in far less time as recently as just a few weeks ago.
The problem, I realized after mulling it over, was that despite emphasizing (to myself) the flexibility of my schedule, my adherence to its individual elements verged on obsession. Work was obviously a given, not a place to cut corners, but it didn't require an inordinate amount of time, or any more than usual. It was the other, more optional things that proved difficult to juggle: for example, if I spent an extra hour reading one day, I would contemplate the next day with dread as I tried to envision reading, which I enjoyed doing and struck me as something I should 'work in to my schedule,' and also playing guitar, which I found a very good way to 'get out of my head,' and also watching television (ditto, except most shows were becoming background noise for my Twitter scrolling, which is never quite relaxing). Lurking behind this dread of fitting everything in was a sense of disbelief that thousands of people were getting sick and dying, thousands more were taking care them, along with some guilt for having a relatively stable job that allowed me to work from home. It seemed important -- as a way to counter or perhaps regulate the chaos of the outside world -- not only to strictly adhere to my own regimen, but also to increase its difficulty, to get through the steps of my day as if I were following an exercise program. But then I understood that I wasn't training for anything: this was my life and I was in it.
I resolved to spend some more time in the garden, where -- as happened each spring -- the new leaves of dogwood reminded me of glowing butterflies. It was one of my favorite parts of spring and it was still here. And this year it was even better than last: the tree had grown, there were more flowers.
The camellia continued to bloom and, unlike every other year, I had the chance to see its flowers at every hour of the day, to notice how the sun -- as it moved across the sky and filtered down through the neighboring apartment buildings -- changed the petals from translucent white to deep pink, how the flowers looked most ethereal in the light reflected off the windows next door.
The book I've been reading, probably not coincidentally, is How To Do Nothing, by Jenny Odell. It's less about how to do nothing -- if 'nothing' is understood to say, sit in a room in the dark -- than to actively and permanently disengage from the commercial and mostly online world that increasingly demands our time and attention. Odell positions this choice in a long line of thinkers and artists going all the way back to the ancient Greeks, which makes for very interesting reading. Her message, as I understand it, seems to be that the best option is not to completely abandon society -- or the internet -- but to position yourself as a skeptic or an outsider to the more repulsive parts while at the same time becoming more attuned to the interesting and uncommercial world around us, whether in the form of nature or sound or art or anything else whose impact on us can't be measured in units and capital.
As someone who over the course of my life has moved through many communities without ever quite feeling embraced by or at home in any of them, I found the book reassuring. Maybe part of living was learning how to resist it, to fight against the easier choice, to step away from the routine, no matter how logical it seemed.
The discomfort of life, it seemed, was the source of some of its most beautiful things.
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