No Time Like the Present

I have been living in a delusion, a fairly common one, but one to which I had thought myself immune. I suppose it is in the nature of delusion for me to believe this: others may be prone to this false belief, but not me. Heaven forbid.

The delusion is this: eventually things will even out at work and I will finally be able to just work my 40 hours. Everything will henceforth go smoothly, none of my employees will resign, or get sick, or become pregnant, or move to Denver. The way to ensure that this evening out happens (so goes the delusion) is for me to work 50 or 60 hours a week now. I will reap the benefits of all that peace later.

This is bullshit.

The realization of just how far down this particular rabbit hole I had gone arose from the recognition of the many mornings I have been skipping my meditation to go in early to work. This is just nuts. One of the pillars of my system of belief and my regimen of self-care is a steady diet of daily meditation, but I have not been getting that. And I have been feeling its lack.

The reason why this fantasy equilibrium can never come to pass (I just had an epiphany about this today) is that I am confusing situational chaos with constitutional and institutional chaos. Up until this moment (I can just barely admit, even to myself, how long it took) I have been operating on the belief that if I can just handle the current situation adequately, smooth sailing is inevitable. The basic problem with this way of thinking (it seems obvious now) is that the problem is not the situation. First of all, it is in the nature of my work (it's constitution) that there will always be chaos. I work in a bureaucracy, in health care, with many moving parts, and even more egos to clash together. Not to mention the basic fact in any workplace with greater than one employee--there will always be inequities in the way people work, how hard they work, whether or not they come to work consistently, their propensity to illness (and "illness"), the likelihood of a move to Denver, and on and on. It is also in the nature of most institutions to ask of their employees just a bit more than each has the ability to give, and when they succeed in supplying that little bit more, to ask for a little bit more yet. With the increased emphasis on "productivity" (which, thankfully, we do not yet have to contend, at least not in any measurable form), I have seen many workers devote hundreds of unpaid hours a year to fulfill these unrealistic requirements, which are then steadily ratcheted up.

I am now, it becomes clear, a practitioner of presenteeism, a fascinating word I heard for the first time just the other day, the definition of which is "the practice of coming to work when ill or tired, or remaining at work for extended hours unnecessarily". Because of where I work, I do not go

to work sick, but the other parts of the definition fit me to a tee. Of course, one could argue about the definition of "unnecessary", but to trust that delineation to me would be like trusting an addict with just how much heroin is a good idea. Thus, the 40 hour limit, the built-in definition of a sane work week.

So, here is my public vow: in June I turn 60. For years I had been saying that at 60 I was going to take a 50% position, work only half time. When I took my current supervisory job, this became unrealistic, but I vow this instead: when I turn 60, I will no longer work any more than an average of 40 hours a week. (I say "average" not as a hedge, but because my plan is to work eight nine-hour shifts and one eight-hour shift every two weeks, taking the tenth day off). As part of this vow, I am going to inform my employers and employees of this. And now I am telling you. And my wife. And everyone who will listen. And I ask that you all hold me to it.

What I can get done in 40 hours, I will get done. What I cannot, I will not. In all likelihood, it will remain undone. And it probably (sadly) won't make all that much difference. That, too, is part of the delusion, isn't it, that my work is so extraordinarily valuable that the place would FALL APART if I worked less than 50 hours a week. How grandiose is that?

Maybe I'll see you in the park. Or the coffee shop. The movie theater. A museum. Anywhere, anywhere, ANYWHERE other than work. I promise.

When Our Hearts Are Overfull They Sing

Why do we sing? What ever prompted some precursor of the homo sapiens to open her mouth and emit a sound that had no essential communicative purpose (or perhaps it did), to belt out a song? Was this a lament? It may have been joyful. It may be that an idle moment came and with it the realization that there was one more thing this voice could do. It could have been in imitation of a bird or a beast. It was, perhaps, a beautiful mistake.

At some point, someone no doubt made the serendipitous discovery that a string stretched across a space and plucked made a pleasing noise. I would imagine they already knew that striking a hollow piece of wood with a solid one made a delightful sound. A raw voice, a plucked string, a drum. Many punk rock bands began with less.

I recently attended a transcendent performance of the Second Piano Concerto of Rachmaninov at the Seattle Symphony. I was struck not only by the essential beauty of the music, but much more deeply moved by the sheer unlikeliness of all these forces coming together in this place together to form this sound. How is it that the plucked string became the four of the violin, or, yet more remarkable, the 88 of the piano encased in a wooden box and struck with hammers? What wells and vast oceans of creativity and genius are implied by the existence of the bassoon. Have you really looked at a bassoon recently? It's come a long way from blowing over the mouth of a hollowed reed.

I also find the dedication implied by the mastery displayed by the 26-year-old pianist Behzod Abduraimov nearly unfathomable. To have a delicacy of touch while maintaining such essential power of expression is astonishing enough, but to show such range and comprehension at such a young age is awe-inspiring. Add to that the hundred or so other musicians who had to pursue their art for decades to reach this stage and meld themselves so perfectly with his playing. Multiply that by the sacrifices which must have been made by families to support these pursuits. Then step back and marvel that we value this noise highly enough to build a beautiful and expensive hall to contain it, that we will pay to see it, will go out of our way, give up a quiet night at home to witness it. I know the word is overused, but this all seems to me something of a miracle.

We plucked a string. We howled a dirge. We whiled a way an hour wondering what would happen if we carved a hole just there on this hollow stick. To us, a cello may seem obvious, but nothing about it was foreordained. It could have been otherwise. Yet there I sat, gazing at hands much like mine that could do things mine never could and never will be able to do, using the same muscles and tendons and ligaments I use for shoveling dirt to coax from a box with strings and hammers the sound of gods and angels.

I have no idea what the genesis of music is in us humans. It is surely unique to us. Though birds sing and other animals low and bellow and roar and growl and bark and purr and hiss, nothing in any other species approaches this essential surrender to complex form and function, growing in complexity as our history progresses, until the stage is set for the wonders of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Adams, and, yes, Rachmaninov. Oh, I know, there are those who have written the history of music; I'm sure I could learn, if I wished, precisely how we got here. But I don't care about the physical history of the thing. What causes me to wonder, to sit back in awe, with tears in my eyes, is pondering what in us holds beauty so dear that we would give such a vast quantity of our time, our effort, our tears, our failures, and our genius to making and witnessing it. That I was present at one of those nexuses of time in which all of this came together in a moment of transcendent bliss seems improbable at best. And yet I was and was transformed, as all art makes us more than what we were and ever more human and, simultaneously, divine.