Vocational Inflection Point

“Taoism, on the other hand, is generally a pursuit of older men, and especially of men who are retiring from active life in the community. Their retirement from society is a kind of outward symbol of an inward liberation from the bounds of conventional patterns of thought and conduct. For Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking.”

― Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

The summer of smoke continues.

Yesterday I flew the Columbia over to Binghamton to diagnose and repair a failed door seal. Alas, we accomplished the former and not the latter, which required ordering parts that should arrive this morning. I'll be heading over that way in a little bit.

Although in theory we had VFR conditions then, and are supposed to have them now, in fact the smoke is so thick you can't find the airfield until you're almost on top of it. At the end of my 17 minute flight over there yesterday, they tried to give me a right base to Runway 16. I suggested that maybe we'd all be better served if I flew a "practice" ILS (I was VFR, and technically couldn't fly an instrument approach). Unable to see much of anything more than a couple miles off each wing, I followed [practice] vectors to find the [practice] final approach course, and then didn't see the runway until maybe three miles from touchdown.

And today looks even worse.

All this aviating is happening in a soup of depression mixed with panic. At the macro level, the end of the Republic stands as a constant source of grief and anger. I won't recount the day's headlines here; if you're awake you're seeing it as well. We're just too old to bounce back if they wipe out the economy, and feeling rather powerless to do much more than wave a sign on the side of the road as the Republifascists dismantle democracy and the very infrastructure of our nation. And there won't be any vaccines in the pipeline, as meanwhile the Chinese are in the midst of a struggle with the next pandemic taking shape over there. There is no good news anymore.

Closer to home, my paralegal remains in the hospital with who knows what. My productivity has ebbed to a shadow of what it was just a week ago, as I learn how to file things in court, and how to format documents from macros that have all sorts of crazy hidden tabs and commands in them that jumble the words when it comes time to convert to pdf. My favorite was the simple notice that somehow decided the letters and numbers in the signature block needed to be arranged in a single-file vertical line for several pages. A document that once took me ten minutes to generate takes an hour. And all the while, the phone's ringing and my four email accounts are jammed with hundreds of unread messages.

Something's got to give. I'm not one for drama, but if J can't work for a few weeks or months (and I strongly suspect that's what is coming), I may have no choice but to withdraw in most or all of my cases, putter along with mediations and a small office practice, and get ready to live on a lot less. I always figured I'd decide when it was time, but it seems that decision may have been made for me.

Time to get started chipping away at it. Mounds of work need to go out the door today, and I still have a tax final tomorrow. None of this is any fun. Ready to go be a semi-retired Taoist, learn to be still and live in the present moment. An involuntary luxury.