Alfred Stevens:
Hesitation (Madame Monteaux?) (c. 1867)

"Life cannot be fulfilled by merely satisfying obligations."

I love to weed my gardens. I'd rather be on my knees digging dirt than do anything else, although I do maintain a mental list of the activities I most enjoy. Curiously, on any given day, I'm unlikely to engage in any activity on that list. I prioritize otherwise, first dispatching obligations to satisfy expectations. Then, I'm more likely to engage in hygiene activities, cleaning up messes. While certain satisfactions come from completing these, I cannot honestly report that they please me. I'd rather be weeding. Still, I catch myself making excuses that delay me from engaging in this most favorite occupation. It might be too hot or too cold. I seem easily dissuaded as if I require perfect conditions to engage in this most perfect of all possible occupations.

This might say something about how I was raised. In my birth family, certain obligations were automatically prioritized to the top of every to-do list. The lawn was mowed on an unerring schedule. Housecleaning happened on Saturday mornings. Dishes were religiously cleaned immediately after every meal. Our sink never featured piles of dirty anything. I sensed that my parents always contributed more than their share, so it always seemed essential that I do my meager parts without complaining. I learned to prioritize my pleasures for later—some days for never—pleasure being somehow less important than every other potential focus. I suppose I'll continue this pattern into my dotage.

How would it be if I felt as though I could blithely do as I please? Would that even please me? I sometimes cringe at the prospect of engaging in some pleasurable activity. I inevitably think there surely must be something more critical needing my undivided attention. I'm not above inventing obligations to fill the odd empty spaces in my formal agenda. The cats suddenly seem to need their supper. At that very moment, the bathroom mirror started screaming at me to clean it. An urgent desire to reorganize my sock drawer overtakes me. It could be anything.

I might correlate pleasure with sin, rendering even my beloved weeding a weakness, a crime. Most of the time, I lose time when I engage in my pleasures. I slip in between time's wrinkles and reawaken sometime later with a clean garden before me. I carry little memory of the actual activity involved. I have my strategies for removing each kind of weed. I can usually pull mallow out by its shoulders, keeping the long taproot intact. Clover must be undermined and care taken if it's developed seed pods, which easily explode with promise of even more future weeding. The soil here is mostly Loess and remarkably porous. Even if dried and hardened, It quickly crumbles into dust with the slightest provocation. I've worked clay in my time. When we lived back East, the clay and the humidity made weeding next to impossible and real work. What had been my great pleasure became a greater pain, and I longed for my home gardens where I could be king again.

They say that we cannot remember pain. Oh, we recall our responses, but we cannot muster its sensation. That gratefully slips away, leaving more of a reference than an experience in its wake. Try as I might, I cannot reconstruct the sensation of breaking my foot. I clearly recall that I swore to make a point to avoid repeating that experience. It might be that we likewise do not store our pleasures. It might be that no sensory experience can be accurately captured by recollection. Poets write poems referencing a perfect summer day, and their words might even induce sensations, just not the same sensations evoked when present and immersed in such experiences. I understand that I find pleasure when weeding my garden, but I can't recall the sensations I feel when so engaging. It might be that I find my pleasure in the absences such engagements induce. I clearly remember dispatching even my most minor obligations but only distantly recall the pleasures I've found on my knees, weeding out my gardens.

It might be a gift to be unable to recall. It might be one of the greatest gifts of all, a form of Grace we cannot adequately replace. It exists as a space between much sharper recollections, sandwiched between putting on the gloves and washing off the dust that caked my wrist around my watch. I exit for the duration of the best and the worst experiences. In their beneficence, the Gods must understand that some experiences should not be representable in recollection but merely as an absence on the record. For a time, I exit this existence to inhabit an orthogonal plane. I return with a hole in my schedule, a transcendent space. I went someplace and then returned. I don't need any more precise memory. I must recall, though, that I am owed these respites and must insist, regardless of competing interests. Life cannot be fulfilled by merely satisfying obligations. It demands reward, even for the most HesitantHedonist.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz