One-Seventh Above Water

I endeavor to reclaim my daily writing habit, but to do more of it in the consumable public and less tucked into the folds of my paper, combustible, shadowy journals. And tonight's stream-of-consciousness reveals only a fraction of what lurks beneath the surface of my mind, much like the above-referenced iceberg.

There is so much we do not know: about the world around us, about the circumstances and situations we find ourselves in every day, or about the people in our lives, or our own stories and desires, about how things will turn out as we grind down the path we call Life. If there is a tired and boring theme developing of late in my musing, it is this quality of gambling, of not much guarantee around payouts or wagers in the Game Of Life. I suppose it is reasonably true that predictable outcomes would make the act of living a bit more boring, but of late, I would happily plop a great big helping of Routine onto the roulette wheel from which I keep eating my moment-to-moment experience. I am really quite sick of the ever-changing cast of locations and dinner tables and cities and weather patterns and intimate routines and so on. A little pedantic rut sounds appealing right about now.

Someone will now caution me, sotto voce: "Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it."

And indeed, that is where my mind has gone, burrowing so deeply into topics others might leave unturned: the qualities and payout of a life that's maybe a bit too predictable, a bit too benighted. A bit too neglected. Because I can enumerate plenty of those of late, and the folks living those quieter, unremarked lives are restive and atrophied; they will not remain still much longer.

And therein lies the pickle of my evening: to rut or not to rut, that is the question. Seems as with most everything else, it is a matter of moderation, of balance between extremes. Of finding the sweet spot between boredom and chaos, between ideal and banal. I posed the following question to a friend recently -- if the most important part of a house is the foundation, how does one pay adequate attention to that foundation? Most of us walk on it every day, never giving it a second thought, until it breaks, busts, fails, and *then* it's a pain in the ass to deal with the needed repairs, assuming it can even be repaired at all. I view most of my own life in this way, from the fundamental of a largely unseen and un-thought-of foundation, upon which I have built everything else in my life -- friendships, family, career, long-term relationships. And I never maintain it. Almost none of us really do.

Isn't that sort of guaranteeing epic failure? But what of preventative maintenance on something so unseen, so unglamourous? I find it stymies me, and clearly it stymies most of us, because we do piss-poor jobs of caring for that most basic element of our lives -- knowing our selves and performing self-care on ourselves.

I asked a friend tonight over dinner what she wanted. And like me, she felt a little perplexed in the face of such a bald, rarely-asked question. What does she want? In the greater context of her life, is it the details that make her happy, or the construct upon which she hangs those details? Is it the people in her life? How she spends her time? Makes her living? Strives for the next goal? Any or all of these may or may not make her tick. And in asking her what winds her clock, I realize that what has wound mine has changed, and the only way I could realize this was to look at the damn thing and tinker with it.

In that metaphor of foundations, I have to walk around on the floor, testing for soft spots, listening for squeaks. Are there termites? Rats? Boogey men? It should be on my schedule of routine maintenance, and I suspect it should be on all of ours. Because one never really knows when the floor may fall in, and bring the roof down with it.

Which means -- there goes the rut. And maybe the neighborhood, too.