Middle Season #36

 

DRL history highlights - the facts

 January

• Garage door opener broke; dad and I replaced it
• we get a new dishwasher
• I smash my finger in the car door; nail turns black
• HG gets COVID

February

• JG gets COVID
• Russia invades Ukraine
• Beijing Olympics
• Harry and Dennis hunt for a condo (J and I visit, stay at the Thompson)
• 125K on Touareg
• mask mandate ends at school

March

• J interviews at Vine Academy, DGS, Leyden
• I buy iPhone 13
• remove black nail 3/20 (two months after I do it)
• We take spring break trip to Austin

April

• Harry & Dennis close on condo 40 E Delaware
• J interviews OPRF
• buy patio furniture

May

• heavy rain, seepage
• plant garden
• J interviews at Nazareth Academy, Fenwick,
• I do a lot of hardscaping, landscaping, visit lots of nurseries

June

• fule is 5.99/gal
• 130K on Touareg
• Supreme Court overrules Roe v. Wade
• Nashville trip
• St. Louis for Trey's wedding

July

• Glacier Trip
• get big mirror for bedroom from H&D
• basement leak after storm
• buy small Bose speaker ($79)

100 Things That Made My Year

100 Thing of 2022

Here is 2021's list: link. Here's is 2020's list: link Here is 2018's list: link  Here's 2017's list: link

1. I made a daily checklist of things to do, organized by these categories: attend, care, make, learn
2. "Note 10" broken down into categories: nature, others, art
3. I start monthly meditation schedule of guided meditations on Insight Timer.  There are different "guides" (Tara Brach, Joseph Goldstein) each day of the week, different recordings from them on different weeks.
4. I begin making weekly cruciferous salad and pot of beans (likely influenced by How Not to Die)
5. I begin "basement workout" that's focused and brief: 10 HIIT on stationary bike, 10 mins of yoga, 10 mins of bodyweight exercises
6. I begin airfrying tofu, and never go back to pan or oven frying
7. I build complex new budget program in Google Sheets based on a template
8. Todd and Julie and Jennie and I go to see four concerts at SPACE in Evanston through year: Son Volt (feb), Chris Smither (apr), John Scofield (sept), Alejandro Escovedo (Oct)
9. Begin adding a poem to the blog on each day after Middle Season (so, 1st, 11th, 21st of each month). This encourages me to read more poetry books.
10. I complete big landscaping project that transforms front yard
11. Jennie and I also see in concert Lucinda Williams
12. Transforming idea: health is like a piggy bank -- there are "contributions" that you can make each day
13. Expanded backyard garden to the patio area with two standing boxes and a couple of urns
14. Began making weekly playlists for Todd (he maybe began this and I reciprocated)
15. Trip to Nashville at the end of the schoolyear with HG... last one before Dennis and Harry move
16. Trey Page wedding in St. Louis (in June?)
17. Begin "where to find" spreadsheet to try to tame my inability to find important paperwork, tools, etc. when I need them
18. Take 10 pictures of leaves in the forest on the solstice
19. Create "Middle Seasons Philology" doc to keep middle seasons notes
20. Montana/Glacier Trip in July
21. Make hummus
22. Begin teaching again after a couple (three?) year break.  Lots of prep over the summer, WAY busier at school, WAY more homework
23. Make Glacier photobook
24. Begin way to get a lot done in 60 minutes: 6x10... focus on one thing (weed garden, water, trim bushes, whatever) for 10 minutes only... landscape triage
25. HG golf competitions
26. Begin "100 Days of..." project... guitar, lower body stability
27. Begin listening to WFMU, specifically Michael Shelley... which transforms my "New Finds" playlists
28. I do my own IFS session (see p. 23 in July)
29. Dew point observation obsession (p. 22, 23). Focusing on the related data of humidity vs. temp vs dew point
30. Guitar - MEMORIZE Satie: gymnopedia, a couple "Study #"s, get back to recording them in voice memos
31. Watch Unforgotten 3 seasons; Leftovers 2 seasons
32. Tom Ryan therapy: you are fucked
33. start jogging 1 mile; end up at 26 or so.  10 at 1 mile; 10 at 1.5; 6 at 2
34. Making lots of song seeds, but no songs
35. get 2 kettlebells to swing
36. 2 great songs: Rami and the Reliables - Red Lil Ditty and NRBQ - Be Here Now
37. Continue guitar - 14 in a row, record Studies 3, 4, 5, 9
38. Evanston Farmers Market -- walking around Blick Art Store
39. Make (at least) 4 pestos in Aug and Sept
40. 10x10 project: learn coding
41. 10x10 project: watercolor technique
42. Madison visit
43. 3x10... 10 mins of office paperwork/house tidying/deeper clean of ONE thing
44. start poem index
45. do a lot of blog index
46. Honey Hill apple picking
47. Dick Blick apron that Jenni gets me for Xmas; 
48. Begin listening to Cool Tools podcast... following what Kevin Kelly is doing
49. Run 7 days in a row
50. making garbanzos in the instantpot; making applesauce in instantpot
51. Roadtrip to Dodgeville in Oct
52. Plant tulips; clean up garden
53. 51st year blog index project completed
54. get to 59x guitar practice
55. Pyramid of daily dozen (p. 73)
56. Several new recipes - Green Owl, Curry, White beans, migas tacos
57. Do 30 poem drafts in November
58. Get out of sad funk with pomos and Bemis walk
59. Achieve breaking point with kid and family; don't attend Christmas; take a break from talking, seeing (lots of sad reflection in Nov and Dec)
60. Captivate by mulch after run (p. 8)
61. Created color "master to do" list for work and home 
62. I small glass of wine at Xmas eve; none at xmas... none on vacation... none in the new year (it's now 1/20)
63. Restart/complete Brach/Kornfield meditation course
64. Jennie gives me wool clogs like the ones we saw on kid/man in Montana
65. TV Shows: 10 Houses that Changed America
66. Books:

100 Tips for a Better Life

 This blog lists what the title says.... a little bit like the Kevin Kelly list.  I like how it's divided in the following categories:

1. Possessions
2. Cooking
3. Productivity
4. Body
5. Success
6. Rationality
7. Self
8. Hazards
9. Others
10. Joy

I think there are 10 items in each.   Unlike Kelly's, it's just a list of stuff he found online, including a couple that I found that Kelly himself wrote. I wouldn't use these exact categories.  

There's another website called "52 Things I Learned This Year."  Same thing... stuff culled online... I like it a little bit because it seems like it's a steady learning each week.

I'm here - the snow falling - Issa

 

Hasui Kawase

Here,

I'm here -

The snow falling    Issa Kobayashi

Today I thanked her

 Thanking a Monkey

There’s a monkey in my mindswinging on a trapeze,reaching back to the pastor leaning into the future,never standing still.
Sometimes I want to killthat monkey, shoot it squarebetween the eyes so I won’thave to think anymoreor feel the pain of worry.
But today I thanked herand she jumped downstraight into my lap,trapeze still swingingas we sat still.
Kaveri Patel. Learned about on Tara brach # 20

Christmas Gifts

 

Something else I am working on this year – graciously accepting gifts. Gifts are not really my love language and for the past few years I have been unfairly projecting that onto everyone else around me, campaigning for the end of family gifts or dismissing gift lovers as superficial victims of consumer culture. When in reality... giving a gift is THE ultimate form of love for a lot of people. And it feels really unfair to reject that. It is heartbreaking to imagine giving love and having it shot down. Or hearing from someone “I know you want to try to love me in a way that feels meaningful to you, but please don’t.” Long story short – my goal this year is to remember that we all show love in different ways. And I hope to be more gracious in receiving it across the board.

Found this on Olivia Herrick Designs on Instagram.  

Move at a gentle pace

 

The object returns to wholeness

 

Kintsukuroi: the art of repairing broken pottery with powdered gold or platinum mixed with lacquer; the repair reflects the history of breakage. The “repaired” object mirrors the fragility and imperfection of life & also its beauty & strength. The object returns to wholeness. 

The “golden repair” is not hidden. It shows a vessel’s undisguised damage, combining ordinary stuff & precious metals to repair the brokenness. but not hiding it. This is how transformation happens by incorporating the suffering into a stronger material, the material of goodness.

From Joan Halifax Tweet

Winter confinement

 

Shufu Miyamoto

Tired of hearing Worldly things: Winter confinement

Kyoshi Takahama

Winter Begins!

 

 Pieter Bruegel the Elder

In seed time learn

in harvest teach,

in winter enjoy

-William Blake

Middle Season #35

 

If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things

Early dusk.  The first "staying" snow.  Photo from nearby park. 

 Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,

a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.

If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,

this is the best season of your life.

- Wu-men

The first day of summer

 

From a Tweet by the English Oak Project: Shortest day soon, which is to all eternal optimists, the first day of summer

The buds on the trees in winter

 From a Tweet by Leif Bersweden:  "Have you ever noticed the buds on the trees in winter?"

Tree species, L-R, top to bottom:

Guelder-rose (Viburnum opulus)

Wild Privet (Ligustrum vulgare)

Alder Buckthorn (Frangula alnus)

Ash (Fraxinus excelsior)

Spindle (Euonymus europaeus)

Buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica)

Wayfaring-tree (Viburnum lantana)

Dogwood (Cornus sanguinea)

Field Maple (Acer campestre)

Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus)

Horse-chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum)

Elder (Sambucus nigra)

He wrote a book called "Trees in Winter"

Knowledge and Power

 LBJ 644, 645

Cultivating the friendship with rich contracter Herman Brown to (at first) secure a federal contract to build a dam near Austin was one of the most important actions that LBJ did.  Brown got richer and began financing LBJ in big and bigger ways.  A second pivotal power move was to get himself associated with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which helped financial Congressional elections.  LBJ used Brown's money (and the money that Brown arranged from his wide network) to support many many Congressmen.  He made sure that the Congressmen knew (through letters and telegrams) that the money came to them from him.

How LBJ (a) cultivated connections and offered money and help, creating a network.

(b) how this gave him knowledge and power

One of the things he does is make lists of individual people who needed money during the 1940 election (so Democrats wouldn't lose the House in a time when Roosevelt and (especially) the Democrats were facing enormous pressured).  (He also activated key friends from the dam building contractor to contribute lots of money.).  These lists took a lot of research about the candidates' chances and positions on key issues that he wanted.  This list-building was key.  He used these lists (districts that have coal mines that produce over 1,000,000 tons of coal per month, etc.) for many other purposes later.

Once he began the correspondence and offered his help, he would ask for election data ("With many of the checks that went out, there went out also a request for a status report, not only on the Congressman's own chances in his district, but on the President's"). (how is FDR likely to do?  How are you likely to do?). Johnson became a nexus for this dispersed information.  The the infancy of the Gallup Poll, this data was key information for the White House.... so he became valuable to White House people.  "Most important," writes Caro, "Johnson could not only get information for the President, he could get it for him fast." He reached out again right before the election to request "real time" information on Election Day.

When Congress returned to session, Johnson was no longer just an irritating (to many) newbie Congressman.  He had connections to party machines in Chicago and New York.  Many senior people knew him and had been helped by him.  According to Caro, "All these things combined to radically alter Johnson's status."  And "His power was simply the power of money." (659)

The book is -- at heart -- about the building of status and power.  And this is a remarkable section of the book.  Having cultivated money backing (from Brown), he used that money (other people's money) to make connections and put others in his debt.  Caro takes care to say that Johnson never had a political philosophy beyond building power.  Lots of his money came from super conservative oil men in Texas who knew that, though they knew he was liberal, Johnson would never allow them to lose some huge financial perks.

Both knoweldge and money produced power

Fully Living

Tomioka Soichiro (Japanese, 1922-1994)

Trees, 1961

 Oil on canvas

This week, after work, there's been nothing but homework, chores, a bit of exercise, making dinner, and a bit of reading.  The me outside of that has dwindled. (and not just this week.) What is there, after the chores, the work, exercise, after the TV, the compulsive reading?  Where is the true life? What is the true life? Would woodwork scratch this itch? Having a summer home? Drinking better wine? What's the stuff of "real life"?

Would having a better relationship with my kids?

I started a list in my journal, compelled from these thinkings, a version of "Ideas Towards a Larger Life."  What would make me feel like I was "fully living"?

I know the Buddhist answer would be: live the life you are living right now, enjoy the "now."

I have "accomplished" a great number of things: healthier eating, regular exercise (including resistance and mini HIIT training).  I keep a journal, do gratefulness lists every day.  I meditate daily, sometimes 2x/day.  I have 12 or 13 things on my daily checklist of things of "wise habits" that I hit 40-50% at each day... and get the impression now that I could be getting 100% and not feel any different.

Last night on PBS Newshour, there was a mother of a child killed at Sandy Hook Elementary 10 years ago.  The journalist asked how she spends the anniversary.  She replied that she had several rituals, but the day always ended with several hours walking on the seashore.  She said she was "re-grounded in nature." (or something like that).  In this case, being in nature isn't necessarily the "stuff of life," but a necessary corrective to the trauma.

 

The structure of teaching

I'm listening to Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield's 40-day introduction to meditation on Insight Timer.  Several helpful things they do almost every time make me think about teaching. 

There is always a clear sense of continuity from day to day, like:

On the first of practice, you x, y, z.  Today we'll explore this we move into practice.

In the last few days, we have been (working on negative emotions), we can also cultivate POSITIVE emotions.  

In the past sessions, you've been widening your field of...

You're now prepared to learn one of the most important aspects of mindfulness practice: how to respond when you have strong emotions. 

Very often there will be a connection to a "scientific" why, like: 

recent studies have shown that...

Very often there will be a connection to a wisdom person -- Dali Lama, Thomas Merton, a poem

Brach takes part of this quote, ignoring the activism and focusing on the the idea that we were are all involved in the "rush and pressure."  “There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.

At the end of the session there's always a connection to how this can affect your life today, like:

Enter your next activity with relaxed spacious presence.  

Don't Complicate Life

 

From Brad Stulberg on Twitter:

Just like you become your habits, you also become the people with whom you surround yourself. Choose wisely. You might think this means "happy" or "positive" people. But I'd challenge you to think about it as authentic, vulnerable, honest, humble, and curious people.

Someone responds to that Tweet with:

Do they give us energy?  And Do we learn from them? 

Toil of farming

Robert Caro writes about the endless toil on a Hill Country farm before electricity.  There was milking and getting water (leaving all women stoop-shouldered) and ironing, shearing, and cooking from scratch every day. Women looked worn out and old at 45... at 35.  Here's a example of the book about canning.

In the Hill Country, canning was required for a family's very survival. Too poor to buy food, most Hill Country families lived through the Winter largely on the vegetables and fruit pricked in the Summer and preserved in jars.

   Since- because there was no electricity- there were no refrigerators in the Hill Country, vegetables or fruit had to be canned the very day hey cane ripe. And, from June through September, something was coming ripe almost every day, it seemed; on a single peach tree, the fruit on different branches would come ripe on different days. In a single orchard, the peaches might be reaching ripeness over a span as long as two weeks; "You'd be in the kitchen with the peaches for two weeks," Hill Country wives recall. And after the peaches, the strawberries would begin coming ripe, and then the gooseberries, and then the blueberries. The tomatoes would become ripe before the okra, the okra before the zucchini, the zucchini before the corn.

So the canning would go on with only brief intervals -- all Summer.

   Canning required constant attendance on the stove. Since boiling water was essential, the fire in the stove had to be kept roaring hot, so logs had to be continually put into the firebox. At least twice during a day's canning, moreover--probably three or four times a woman would have to empty the ash container, which meant wrestling the heavy, unwieldy device out from under the firebox. And when the housewife wasn't bending down to the flames, she was standing over them. In canning fruit, for example, first sugar was dropped into the huge iron canning pot, and watched carefully and stirred constantly, so that it would not become lumpy, until it was completely dissolved. Then the fruit-perhaps peaches, which would have been peeled earlier- was put in the pot, and boiled until it turned into a soft and mushy jam that would be packed into jars (which would have been boiling to sterilize them.- in another pot) and sealed with wax. Boiling the peaches would take more than an hour, and during that time they had to be stirred constantly so that they would not stick to the pot. And when one load of

*peaches was finished, another load would be put in, and another. Canning was an all-day job. So when a woman was canning, she would have to spend all day in a little room with a tin or sheet-iron roof on which a blazing sun was beating down without mercy, standing in front of the iron stove and the wood fire within it. And every time the heat in that stove died down even a bit, she would have to make it hotter again.

Hive by Kevin Young

 Hive 

by Kevin Young

The honey bees’ exile
     is almost complete.
You can carry

them from hive
     to hive, the child thought
& that is what

he tried, walking
     with them thronging
between his pressed palms.

Let him be right.
     Let the gods look away
as always. Let this boy

who carries the entire
     actual, whirring
world in his calm

unwashed hands,
     barely walking, bear
us all there

buzzing, unstung.

Middle Season #34

 

Assiduously Cultivating Clark Foreman

When LBJ was building power as a young Senator, he was both charming and energetic and a master manipulator of others, using their passions, interests, vanity to make them want to work for him.  His power was "cultivating people."  The book "Path to Power" by Robert Caro is filled with stories of such cultivating... the doing of favors to be called in later, sycophancy, flattery.

About one important White House figure, Goldschmidt... "But, easy-going and not as intensely fired by personal ambition as the other members of his group, he was malleable material in Johnson's hands. He was... passionately idealistic, and the focus of his passion was public power... When Johnson put the case for the Marshall Ford Dam in those terms, Goldschmidt believed him -- and was willing to do anything he could to advance the cause of the dam."

"Johnson knew how to make the most of such willingness. He had been assiduously cultivating Clark Foreman..."

He wasn't cultivating "the friendship" of.... he was cultivating him.

Caro's book is the tracing of the political power. 

LBJ's path to success is not often pretty.  The chapter "Longlea" details his affair with a beautiful wife of a very powerful Texas man.  Caro talks about how he uses his normal sycophantic moves to the older man (Branch?) while he has a secret affair with his longtime girlfriend, X Glass.  Caro notes the effect that this has on people in the house (Longlea, a 1000-acre compound in Virginia build by Branch for Glass), including Branch's children who saw him buttering up Caro and making love to his long-time girlfriend.

Transforming Fear

 From Insight Hour Podcast with Joseph Goldstein #143: Transforming Fear

Aversion can manifest in striking out, in grieving loss, and in fear.

The goal of this talk is to "transform feelings from fear to freedom."

He says there's benefit for practitioners to be at the edges, boundaries, limits of fear to investigate.  That's where fear reveals itself.  

Fear can be of pain, of change, of not changing, of discomfort, and emotional pain.

He wonders to what extent is comfort the condition for any of our actions?  He asks us to investigate "what initiates movement" throughout the day?  (from avoiding minor pain to going to get food to eat to avoiding conversations) To "avoid unpleasantness."  He advises us to try not to move at all for a time.  To investigate "what are the causes of movement"

Fear often is "contracting" physically (or emotionally); self-pity

There's a Pali word that's often translated as "selflessness" which is also translated as "understanding that things are ungovernable.. things have their own laws".... it's not as I wish... things react to conditions (ungovernableness of things)

He talks about fear of emotions... "touching the shadow side of ourselves"... this is when emotions we have are not acceptable to ourselves and we don't even recognize that.  These are emotions that makes us feel unworthy, jealous, abandoned, failures

We create a personae to show the world in order to get validation of a thing that we are not

Imagine that big emotions are like kids in Halloween costumes.  You're not really scared of them.

as we open, we see the insubstantial nature of phenomenon.

There is no security -- all is arising and dissolving; in flow; 

We all have strategies for "fixing" or "holding" or "keeping" a moment

We don't have to push the river.

"Let it go" is almost too active.  Better is "let it flow" let it follow its own nature

Story from Carlos Castenada book.  when we are stressed, we might respond with wrath or self-pity.  We train ourselves unconsciously to do this.  After struggle, we have learned to feel sorry for ourselves.  And one feature of this thing is that it's ready to advise us in our times of stress.  Death, though, is a better advisor.  We can learn to feel our impending death.  Let each act be your last battle on earthy.  You'll find a strange consuming happiness with this attitude.

Goldstein says that we should pay attention throughout the day for moments that we are free of desires, when we are not clinging.  Our mind is cooled from the fire of wanting.  We have direct experience of teh absence of fear.  the more we recognize it, the more we have access to it.

The steps: be mindful of the fear, accept it (it's OK, the fear is here, it's OK), then let it pass.  Courage is not the absence of fear.  

Extra glands

 From Path to Power by Robert Caro.

Rowe and Corcoran, disciples of Justice Holmes, called the tirelessness and enthusiasm that they admired "energy. "Holmes used to say that in the last analysis the only thing that mattered was energy, " Corcoran says, "and Lyndon just bristled with it." Fortas, more precise, says, "It was a matter of intensity more than anything, an intense concentration on whatever was being talked about, or on whatever was the problem in hand."... "The guy's just got extra glands."  [Rowe said] "Listen, I mean I worked for Roosevelt and Holmes. They were the two perfect people.  Johnson was never going to [become one of my idols] -- he and I were of an age -- but he didn't bore me for one minute. He never bored anyone.  He was a magnetic man physically, and you never knew what was going to happen next. He was a remarkable man."

...

And in describing Lyndon Johnson, the words the members of this little group use are "vibrancy," "vitality," "urgency," "intensity," "energy," -- and "passion."  

There is something I should learn here

 From Art of Noticing Newsletter; readers wrote about their own ways to get out of boring situations.  This one I liked:

“Boredom/ anxiety-trick at social events I didn't particularly want to attend is: 'I'm undercover, trying to find useful information, don't know from who, but there is definitely something I should learn here.' This gives me interest and social courage, helps me ask much better questions, and I always end up enjoying the event, even when I was SURE I wouldn't.”

Simply trust

 Simply trust:

 do not the petals flutter down,
               just like that

Issa

Do the next and most necessary thing

 Dear Frau V. 15 December 1933

Your questions are unanswerable because you want to know how one ought to live. 

One lives as one can. 

There is no single, definite way for the individual which is prescribed for him or would be the proper one. 

If that’s what you want you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what. 

Moreover this way fits in  with the average way of mankind in general. 

But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. 

If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. 

Then is it naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. 

And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. 

So long as you think you don’t yet know what this is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. 

But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate. 

With Kind regards and wishes, 

Yours, sincerely,

C.G. Jung

He made them feel needed

Brittanica Online

In The Path to Power, Robert Caro illustrates the transformation of LBJ from someone noone liked through his childhood and college into someone with incredible charisma.  Earlier I noted the section on his incredible effort and drive that showed up in his early school teaching career.  

Here, LBJ is working as a NYA administrator and being incredibly rude and abusive to workers in his office... yet people still were drawn to him.  

Cursing his men one moment, he removed the curse the next -- with hugs ("I saw him get angry at Sherman Birdwell one time, and he used most of the cuss words and combinations I  had ever heard," Morgan says, "and just as soon as he got through eating his ass out, he had his arm around him") and with compliments, compliments which, if infrequent, were as extravagant as the curses: remarks that a man repeated to his wife that night with pride, and that he never forgot.  He made them feel needed. (358)

In that same paragraph, Caro writes:

Mary Henderson recalls watching him in a crisis, when he was "absolutely frantic with worry." And she recalls that when the crisis was over, "he said: 'I have never been in need of people, or been in trouble, without looking around and finding your face.' And he put his arm around me. And I was nobody. Oh, you wanted to please him more than anything." (359)

Henderson later recounts:

I find it hard to understand when I talk about it now. But he had what they call now a charisma. He was dynamic, and he had this piercing look, and he knew exactly where he was going, and what he was going to do next, and he had you sold down the river on whatever he was telling you.  And you had no doubts that he was going to do what he said - no doubts at all..... Working for him was very exciting. Fascinating. History was being made. The country was being turned around. And Lyndon was one of the turners -- one of the makers and the doers and the shovers.

So much matters!

 From Oliver Burkeman's newsletter The Imperfectionist titled "Urgency Doesn't Exist," this part about the notion of how "urgent tasks" rule our day.  Very often things are "urgent" because of someone else's priorities.  That's not unimportant... but it shouldn't rule our day.

The way through this muddle begins, I think, by seeing that what we call “urgency” is actually just another kind of importance – not some separate, stress-inducing quality that attaches itself to certain tasks, demanding their immediate completion. And definitely, time-sensitivity is one of the factors that can make a task worth prioritising. Deadlines do matter, whether you’re paying a bill, launching a product, buying a birthday present or leaving for the school run. But time-sensitivity is one factor among many. There’s no need to think of urgency as some uniquely powerful force that gets to muscle its way in front of everything else.

If this strikes you as a purely conceptual distinction, I can only respond that, for me, it’s been transformative. It helps me see the truth of my situation, which is that every day, when I wake up, there are thousands upon thousands of genuinely important ways I could spend my day – certainly incalculably more than I’ll have time for. So much matters! Meaningful work matters. My relationships with my wife and son and friends matter. Paying the bills matters. Cleaning the house matters. Rest matters. Fun matters.

And somehow, the sheer overwhelming number of things that matter has the effect of cutting “urgency” down to size. Because I’m finite, my task for the day can only possibly be to do a few things that matter. Inevitably, a far greater number of things that matter will fall by the wayside – doubtless including a few that derived their importance from their time-sensitivity.

Oh well: such is the human condition.

De La Soul is Dead by Kevin Young

 

Four Poem that are part of a sonnet cycle called "De La Soul is Dead."  Each poem ends with an image/phrase that the next poem picks up immediately.  (Gone too soon...My mother silent in the car). The next poem picks it up in a different sense... different tone completely.  Each poem is a song that's important to him.  All poems about "college years."