Just practicing

Saturday afternoon, sun shining, husband with a cold stuffing up the right side of his head, is napping on the living room couch and me, dog sitting a little guy named Fargo while I begin to practice writing on my laptop.  This past week I finished lecture 13 of 26 of the online Great Courses course, Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft.  To get it, that is to develop the skill, I must practice, so readers, you must endure my attempts at composition.  What is problematic today is that my brain is constipated. I have no idea, no titillating adventure or situation to write about.  All I have is daily life.

Lately, my life is just daily life, filled with routine and required tasks that must be done -- the exercising, the grocery shopping, the bill paying, the clothes cleaning, the cooking -- punctuated with an occasional movie, dinner out or walk around town.  When strung together, it's pretty clear that daily life is monochromatic, flat and ho-hum. It's enough to frighten anyone back into work.  I remember my mother and other bright women of the 1950's and 60's with their struggle to stay sane because they were relegated to the daily life.  My mother ate her insanity, ending up weighing 250 pounds. 

On the other hand, the daily grind, the work, the routine of coming and going to an office, the responsibility of production and timeliness, does keep the insanity of daily life at bay, but often creates stress and conflict as the two battle for attention.  But, whether I loved or hated my daily grind, it was a important because it gave me, like most people, an identity, something that defines us to the rest of the world.  Even financially secure people keep working when they definitely could do nicely without it.  Like myself, they resist retirement because retirement makes us confront the insanity of the daily life and the loss of identity.

Some people, like myself, leave work to "retire" because of the burnout when an identity shatters.  In the 1998, after my consultant identity exploded, I returned to school to figure out what the emerging networked digital world was about.  The resulting doctorate gave me a new identity, professor.  Then six years later, I retired again, not due to burnout, but more due to weariness and repetition. The passion was gone, I tossed aside both identities of professor and consultant. I was living in the Memphis, the city that never grew out of the 1950's and all that is "The South". Naively, I was sure I would become a novelist with minimal effort.  I'd co-authored two business books, so why not make the leap easily? Writing certainly kept me busy and my brain synapses connecting, but the intense social isolation and the fact that I was years away from fame and fortune as a successful writer, drove me back to the comfortable consultant identity and then to five years as a federal  government CIO, yet another identity. I had to ask myself, "What was I thinking?"

Now, like a beast emerging from battle, tired, scarred, but very much alive, the lessons learned are clear.  In this retirement, I have the opportunity and time to discover myself.  Self-discovery can lead to a more holistic identity, integrating my daily life with work that I will do for the shear joy of it, for that is how I will be paid.  I will integrate and transform the daily grind with daily life into daily pleasure. My pleasure comes from writing, a skill of expression that gets better with practice, and from sailing, a skill of action that gets sharper and bolder with practice.  I am pulling the two threads into my daily life.  Perhaps, I may weave a whole cloth, a strong, lasting, embracive identity. 

As my first grade teacher, Miss McDermott, often said, as I struggled with my yellow #2 pencil and wide, blue lined woody paper to write my first sentences, "Practice makes perfect".