Pieter Cool: Chariot with the Seven Deadly Sins (c. 1590)

"Saidlines are not deadlines …"

The days leading up to any scheduled departure become increasingly challenging as the date approaches. My internal monologue escalates toward a frantic pitch as I enumerate fresh expectations to myself, setting Saidlines. I begin with a single relatively simple notion of something I should accomplish before allowing myself to leave, something like 'clean out the fridge,' always a good idea if I'll be absent for more than a week. If I could only leave my expectations there! I continue adding additional notions until I've amassed a burden no ten people could manage to accomplish before departing. I add these additional ones in innocence, for I don't tend to notice how onerous the list has become until after it's already overwhelmed me. Then, I'm negotiating from a position of little power or authority because that list has me by then. There's really only ever one way I will ever manage to exit and that's by deciding what I will leave undone.

I sense an underlying evolutionary imperative working here: I'm not just weird. The Muse tends to be at her absolutely most productive in the final few hours before departing. Hang a business trip on the horizon, and she'll resolve almost all her accumulated procrastinations in the final few hours before departure. I'll awaken to drive her to the airport to find the living room painted a different color, the accounting resolved, a pile of paid bills waiting to be posted, or something similar. She insists it's a form of magic; as those deadlines near, time smears to allow greater content. What might have taken hours resolves itself in a few fleeting minutes, so she tends to leave feeling like a groggy superhero, her to-do list reduced to a proud footnote. On the other hand, I tend to leave beneath a cloud of guilt for all I failed to accomplish, knowing that however long I might remain absent, all I failed to finish will be festering, awaiting my return.

I learn much about myself every time I engage in this dance. I tend to avoid agreeing to leave for this reason, for learning seems like one of the more painful ways to live and is best avoided or dispensed with. Besides, it's not really learning if the same pattern keeps repeating without any apparent improvements. I suspect that I engage in these small self-humiliating dances due to shreds of family trances I learned long before I knew I was learning anything from teachers who had no real idea that others considered them teachers. This process describes how we acquire most of the most essential knowledge in our lives. However, these tend to be tacit understandings, widely unattributed, and perhaps even unconscious until they become troubling. I suspect my father taught me that a lawn must be mowed within forty-eight hours before leaving. I seem to remember noticing that my birth family's house was never tidier than just before we'd go for an extended absence.

I inherited those notions and amplified them for my more modern use; these notions always seem to morph into a form of abuse in the waning hours before I leave. A winter's worth of progressive procrastination stands between me and a proper pre-springtime departure, and my only recourse has ever been to engineer an improper one in response. I have become close to a world-class slinker, for instance. I can keep my head down, hoping nobody will notice my exit, even though it's only ever me who's watching. I have not become even a little bit more skilled at being invisible to myself, no matter how skillfully I slink. I always catch myself slipping out without settling up with myself. My departures become extended exercises in forgiveness, then. I relearn the necessity of making my most generous possible interpretations. I'm leaving, after all, and there's no way in Hell I'm gonna manage to resolve all the expectations I so enthusiastically piled upon myself.

I learn again or try to learn it, how absolutely important leniency must be, for there's never any decent reason to carry any guilt along on any trip. The guilt must be left behind, perhaps to watch over all that didn't get done before leaving this time. Out in the world, the insistent tug that tends to haunt my final few days abandons me, and I start feeling free. I might indulge in a few guilty feelings, but they tend to evaporate in the shadows cast by new and different experiences. My Saidlines might be part of a process for preserving the status quo. The systems thinkers insist that every organism's primary responsibility must always be to preserve the present, and my insistence that I cannot leave before resolving an ever-increasing list of imagined imperatives certainly seems to encourage remaining in the present, especially when it threatens to become the past. The past comes regardless of my diligent expectation-setting or skillful shirking, with only the interesting dance ultimately remaining. Finally, I have what's next to choose from, irrespective of how carelessly I resolved my expectations in any past. Fortunately, Saidlines are not deadlines, and nobody's deeply wounded by their troubles. Bon Voyage!

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #iAlogue , #PureSchmaltz