Thinking Space

“You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”

—Joseph Campbell

8.7.24

Sitting in my home office in Tara, trying to shake off a slow start this Wednesday. As she does most mornings, P commented as she was walking out the door, "If I were you, I'd go back to bed."

This time I did, and slept until 7:40. All my colleagues and clients are on central time, so why not?

Well, for starters this billable life is a bit of a zero sum game. I need to work enough to justify getting out of bed, run five miles at lunchtime as I haltingly start training again for this half-marathon in eight short weeks, and at three this afternoon I meet Matt the PGA accredited golf pro for a lesson out at the country club. Lots to do.

But what a life, eh? Still running at 60, and learning how to play golf after years of frustrated self-instruction. And getting to spend time exactly where on the map I want to be, and not where duty or work or family compels, with the person who always should have been the one to share all this good fortune. If I had the imagination to conjure an ideal life back in my sixty-hour-work-week days before the pandemic, this would be it.

To Joseph Campbell's insightful comment above, this space upstairs in Tara really is the best thinking and writing setting I've ever had, at least when the leaf/snow blowers aren't howling outside.

The curtain's rolled up so the window unit air conditioner isn't blocked. It's gotten plenty of use this summer, but with a forecast high of 78 today I may be able to give it the day off.

As I study the photo, I'm glad I wasn't looking at something embarrassing or attorney-client privileged on my laptop, instead filling the screen with my daily Florida political update from Politico. That also makes me happy to be in New York during this crazy campaign season.

It's hard to believe this used to be a custard yellow guest bedroom when we bought the place. Peg and I spent our very first night at Tara in a double bed where that settee sits today, awakening in the morning to an altercation between a woman living in the flophouse next door and her significant other, who'd arrived home after sunrise alcohol sodden, shirtless, and apparently smeared with evidence of an encounter with another woman. He walked into the house leaving his pickup running and door hanging open, oblivious. Things have been pretty quiet over there ever since, but at the time we were concerned the morning circus was a harbinger of things to come.

Time to lean into today. I'm hoping P gets off early, or at least on time, so we can run up and water the plants at the condo and maybe stay the night. We leave very early Saturday for Florida, hoping to avoid the afternoon thunderstorms, so whatever time we spend up there will be the last for a while.

Meanwhile, responding to a friend's blog about his old Plymouth, I find myself thinking of the Chrysler product I drove in college, a 1981 Dodge Colt I named "Deathmobile", after the Animal House hot rod, but in my case because it had a solenoid problem that only allowed me to start the car once a day. After the engine got hot, it would crank all day and never start. I drove it all the way to Salt Lake City without shutting down once. A real gem of a car.

And so it goes.