I just finished watching the movie "Avatar" this past weekend on DVD, and there are things about it that are still staying with me. I say "finished watching" because at this age, the notion of starting a three-hour movie at about 10:30 at night sounds great only in theory. This never was destined to be anything but a two-night engagement.
After all the hype, I can honestly say that it was visually spellbinding...with dialogue that sometimes sounded jarringly like it was written by fourteen-year-olds who grew up on video games. I found myself watching much of it with detachment, as though I was watching a role-playing video game that someone else was controlling.
But still, there were some stand-out concepts. Six-legged horses? No doubt a smoother ride than the ones that we've got here. Floating mountains? Sign me up for the tour. But the thing I'd really like to get a piece of is that whole "magical braid" thing, where the end of everybody's hairpiece has a collection of tentacles/filaments that allow mystical connection with everything else--your pet raptor, the memories of your ancestors, the divine earth mother.
I could skip connecting with the trees in my back yard, or reading my cat's mind. I suppose catching up on some family history would be nice. But if I had one of those things, there's one soul I'd use it to connect with, and that's Henry David Thoreau. Yes, that Henry David, of Walden Pond fame. The guy who basically took a two year sabbatical from his regular life in the 1840s to live simply in a cabin and observe nature without the interruption of daily routine.
His rationale was pure and simple.
"I went to the wood because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived," he wrote in a famous passage from "Walden." It's one of my favorite parts of the book.
I've been thinking of that passage, along with the magical hair connection from Avatar, for the past few days. My life feels like it's taken on the quality of dog-paddling in the middle of the ocean...and I'm losing ground. There are many reasons for this, the primary one being too many irons in the fire at once. Some of the irons are of my own creation, such as the business of writing, others have been thrust upon me by duty and family and deaths and funerals and the complicated aftermath of those sad but important things.
I found myself feeling entirely scattered yesterday, trying to focus on a dozen things simultaneously but unable to really concentrate on one. I had the tremendous sense that I had become somehow like those fading galaxies one reads about occasionally in a science magazine while waiting in a doctor's office. Expanding inexorably to oblivion, lacking a center of gravity anymore to keep its various particles and planets in orbit.
I called a temporary halt to my dog-paddling, and decided to list the various hats I was wearing, with the urgently spinning plates that went with each. By the time I got to the end of the list, it was nearly fourteen inches long, set in 11 point type. I typed and typed, using bullet points and subheads, and when I sat back and looked at it (after taping the two sheets of paper together for unity's sake), I had a pretty good understanding of just why I've been feeling like I've got too many things to think about at once.
Prosecutor, mother, writer, photographer, estate executor, homeowner, gardener, girlfriend...it was a recipe for a nervous breakdown. It looked like an organizational chart for the Securities and Exchange Commission, with spokes of responsibility radiating out in all directions from a central source. I taped it to my bathroom mirror as a reminder that if I feel overwhelmed on some days...I've got a darned good reason to take a deep breath and reach for another chocolate bar!
That task done, I returned to my keyboard and immediately booked a week later this year at a writer's retreat "up north" in the woods where somebody else will prepare three delicious meals for me every day and clean up afterward, I'll check my cell phone for messages only once a day, if then, and I'll concentrate on just one thing, writing. I've done it before, and there's always been a tremendous payoff in creativity to show for the week. One year I came back home with the first four chapters of a novel written, another year I ended up throwing my energy into writing essays.
There's a lot to be said for doing the "Walden" thing even if just for a week, and immersing yourself in wooded surroundings away from the madding crowd. I can't wait to put the daily routine of scrambling and list-making on hold, and instead stop to admire the lichen on a tree or watch a butterfly alight delicately on a coneflower, knowing that I'm not going to get interrupted.
The sheets of paper attesting to my stress level affixed to my bathroom mirror and the retreat officially booked, I stepped back into the regular swim of things, knowing that of the twenty-six things I should accomplish on any given day, only maybe six might get done. And that will be okay.
Nevertheless, when I got home from work today I decided to leave the indoor, letter-writing, multi-tasking estate-managing chores by the wayside and try to emulate good old Henry David for a bit. I finished unloading a bunch of topsoil and mulch around the base of a tree to start a new garden, and then I really hit the trail for some utilitarian fun. The branches of some of the pine trees next to the hiking path have been getting long enough crowd the path, and so I pondered the question I doubt has ever been presented to Ladies Home Journal--when setting out for a walk in the woods, should I bring the chainsaw or the hand saw?
I opted for the hand saw (who wants to lug the extra weight for more than a half mile?), and for the next half hour focused on one task alone--cutting low branches off of evergreens, and hauling them out of the way so that a lawn tractor could once again get through without trouble. It was not rocket science. It didn't require much precision. But doggone it, it felt good. It was simple, it was repetitive, and it could be measured in the sawdust falling from the blade as it cut through the wood fueled only by the strength of my arms, and the pile of branches as it grew higher and higher.
Two years of this would drive me bonkers, I know. I'm glad Henry David Thoreau got as much as he did from his personal experiment at Walden and then put it all into words for us to share. I'm too much of a "people person" to want to retreat from society for any real length of time.
Tomorrow I know I'll be back at my desk, thinking about search and seizure issues and wondering how I'll ever get all the other things on that fourteen inch list accomplished before I'm eighty. Multi-tasking is like breathing to me.
But sometimes, when the onrushing tide of details gets to be just a bit too overwhelming, I'll try to channel Henry David and his wish "to live deliberately." I'll return to the woods to trim some more branches, or to my garden just to plant something new and watch it grow. And for a little while, at least, those "essential facts" will be purely enough.
