Periodizing Life

“I keep telling people (and myself) that 'I'll sleep when I'm dead' so I continue to overdo it. It now occurs to me that the overdoing could cause my demise.” -My friend Patrick

I laughed SO hard when I saw Patrick’s Facebook status above. I was feeling a similar way that day. But I also felt an immense amount of empathy as well. I know why Pat’s drive is to get as much into life as he can. He’s been battling an illness for years now, and while his immense dedication to staying fit and strong has kept him in amazing shape, the disease has made him more aware of the raw facts of mortality than most of us can claim.

He’s got a lot he wants to get done. But if he does too much, he just might be robbing himself of more time to do it. A tough line to walk.

The Buddha opined that:

“To be idle is a short road to death and to be diligent is a way of life; foolish people are idle, wise people are diligent.”

Note that there is a difference between diligence and mania.

But death is the ultimate backstop when it comes to sorting the wheat from the chafe in life. Belief in the afterlife is a very personal thing, and if you aren’t 100% sure of what’s coming on the other side, then all you’ve got when you’re gone is what you leave behind. Or as Oscar Wilde said,

“Biography lends to death a new terror.”

In my own case, I don’t believe in a traditional afterlife, where I’m reunited with my loved ones in a conscious way, or get to watch over them from above. Instead, I think that the best one can hope for is that the spirit and example left behind is one that works positively in world through the people you’ve connected with while you were alive. I have often thought that if I received a death sentence tomorrow, I’d just start working even more furiously, if only prepare those who depend on me for my impending departure, and to write down everything I want my children to know about who I am, where they came from, and how much I love and believe in them.

In fact, I wouldn’t have had children if I didn’t simultaneously believe that they are good enough as they are born into this world AND could help make the world a better place. So it follows that I hold it as my parental responsibility to both be real – not some fake martyr or holier-than-thou hypocrite – and be a force for shaping the society I brought them into to be sustainable and supportive.

But as my friend Jen recently noted as we ignored our TV watching children to plan a TriROK event, “We should probably draw the line when our children start doing what we started a foundation to stop in others.”

Well stated.

I’m so incredibly happy with what TriROK and TriLife have accomplished the last several years. I’m so proud of the people my kids are becoming and I honestly feel like a ton of hard work pays off every day. That makes me excited to see what the years ahead hold, and intensely grateful for my life.

However…

I am worn out. Just like I periodize training, I tend to schedule work in bursts around vital events, programs, and seasons. By the time I get to a bout of vacation or off the grid time I’m exhausted. The problem is that my “off” time is not my own. With my husband and kids and all their awesome energy, we don't take quiet, relaxing vacations. In fact I usually come back from vacation needing another vacation.

Years of this, with no real down time just for myself, are really starting to take their toll, and I have to admit it. Like a teacher with 20 days of school left, I’m starting to count down – not to our family vacation this summer – but to the weeks after it, when I’m taking myself off the grid from EVERYBODY. Time for reading, training, writing, yoga, far away friends and family…time for ME.

I’m not exactly wishing the time away – life is too short for that for sure. But I’m ready for a break and to come rejeuvenated for the great work and inspiration that lies ahead. This feeling reminds me of a passage from Le Guin’s novel Always Coming Home, which I recently saw again in UU Times:

“It was a good thing for me to learn a craft with a true maker. It may have been the best thing I have done. Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written words slows though to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say.”

One of the things I will contemplate and bring back from my break is that question of once again finding away to balance the slow and the fast of life, the physical and the mental journeys that yield both inspiration and fatigue. Right now, I’m just too tired to think about it. ;)

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