The possibility in 100 days 2
Have I mentioned my plan to write a draft of my thesis in 100 days? I’ve been working on it since October, and day 100 falls on January 25th, about 3 weeks before I’m due, which feels just right for sending off a draft of my thesis before settling into having my first baby; that’s when lots of mamas start maternity leave anyhow. I was inspired to make a 100-day plan after reading an article about development projects getting accomplished in 100 days. The idea is that we can all imagine 3 months ahead; it takes us “out of the realm of business as usual” and focuses our efforts. So I sat down and made a 100-day plan, and so far, it’s really helped focus the daily work on the thesis.
That and the very real deadline of having my baby, and wanting to be able to enjoy him and not have the thesis hanging over my head. So I spend early mornings at my desk writing, and afternoons in the library. My belly grows closer to the table every day, the baby’s wiggles spurring me on and reminding me why I’m working this hard. I’ll let you know how it goes!
What do the possibilities of 100 days make you think of? Anyone want to join me?
Homemade Schedules 4
“I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order – willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.” Annie Dillard in The Writing Life
I had read part of this quote from Annie Dillard many times, and love the blog inspired by it. But I had never read it in context until this summer, and ever since, this quote has stayed with me. (Actually, I’ve thought of blogging about it no less than 10 different times!)
Have you ever lived without a schedule, besides on vacation? Lots of people – parents of young children at home, writers, freelancers, graduate students – make their own schedules. I never imagined how hard it could be until I was working on my thesis research in Barcelona, and had days, weeks, months that were entirely wide open. Then when I got back, I’ve had stretches of time as wide as Montana skies that have no set agenda except “make progress on the thesis”. It surprises me that making and keeping a schedule for myself is one of the hardest things I’ve done, and I think Annie Dillard’s quote captures the reason why.
When schedules are all we know, the idea of being without a schedule sounds great. Yay! Vacation! I can do anything I want with my days! But it turns out the “chaos and whim” a schedule defends against can quickly meld into self-doubt, apathy, depression, or a daily routine of overthinking things. A day with nothing on the agenda becomes long, shapeless as a heap of laundry that needs folding.
This fall I started working on my thesis in the neighborhood library a couple days a week, and going to prenatal yoga twice a week. And a funny thing has happened – with just a couple spots of shape to the week, each day is less amorphous. When I had day upon day at home, I got up in the morning with the burden of planning the day, and before I’d fully woken up already felt the weight of the “shoulds” pressing me down. With a schedule, there are known parts to my days, and it becomes easier to start melding the pieces of wide open time into something less chaotic. Really, it just takes a few things to build a scaffolding for the days, to be able to “stand and labor with both hands at sections of time”, rather than grasp at the days as they slip away.
It seems so simple, doesn’t it? Why isn’t it then? Why is creating our own routine so hard?
Bougainvillea and New Grass 7
No tangerine and pomegranate maple trees here, at least not yet (we do get a few). Fall colors in SF include brilliant spreads of bougainvillea, and bright green hillsides of grass shooting through the brown summer grass. The air has a chill to it, but the sky is blue on my morning walk today. Fall is my favorite time anywhere, but especially here where summers are so disappointingly gray and cold.
Am getting slower walking up the (MANY) hills around here but still trying to walk a few days a week. I do prenatal yoga twice a week too, which helps with the random aches of being six months pregnant. This little one moves a ton, and often makes me smile as he wriggles around while I work on my thesis or sit on the couch next to JJ at night looking for our house.
If you own your house, how long did it take to find it? We’ve been looking for about 2 1/2 months…
Getting Playful 3
Like many wonderful people out there who only manage to blog now and then, I am often asking myself why I don’t participate in the medium more often, considering how much I love it. Overthinking things is definitely part of it for me. Wanting every post to be more elaborated, have my best photos, be a piece of good writing. But isn’t the beauty of the blog partly that it can be a space for smaller things, for telling pieces of a story that little by little thread together over time? I am participating this month in Christina’s daily art project, and am loving how it has me getting more playful. Because really, what do we gain by overthinking things all the time? And what might we discover if we let ourselves be more playful?
So, I’m going to try it out on blogging too. I’ll see you back here soon!
On Taking a Leap 3
Leaps and risks are linked for me like clouds and rain: you can’t have one without the other. To make a leap is to face your fears, imagine your possibilities, and go into the unknown. To leap is to take a risk.
Christina recently wrote about finishing her first book, and finished the post by asking us to think about the leaps in our lives. “When was a time you took an enormous leap? What did it feel like? What happened next?”. Like Caren in the comments to the post, I too made leaps that feel huge to me now “when I was younger and less aware of the insanity of my decisions”. Leaving everything I knew to go to college 3000 miles away, the first in my family, armed only with a scholarship, $400 for books, and a heart full of ambition. Moving to Spain for two years and becoming an English teacher. Moving back to go to grad school, and find my way out of heartbreak. Trusting love and commitment again, when I met JJ.
As a kid, I leaped with abandon. Climbed trees so high that I swayed in the wind, nailed wood into the trunk to make steps and go even higher. Jumped from the peaked roof of my mom’s studio to our house, gasping through the danger of air and sidewalk below until my feet skidded into the sandy gray roof tiles on the other side. Then did it again, hair flying behind me as I took a running start down the sloped studio roof. And raced with my brother to the train tracks after hearing the whistle from a mile away, legs pumping furiously on our bikes, hearts racing as we slapped pennies on the tracks to be crushed by the oncoming freight train.
This year, I took another leap. Stepped off the career track I was on to become a professor, and started imagining doing something that allows more expression for my creative soul. It’s felt like the riskiest leap I’ve taken yet, admitting I was on the wrong path and making space for a new one. The stakes feel so much higher as an adult, the unnamed fears so much more consequential.
About to become a parent myself, I can’t imagine courting danger as I did when I leapt across rooftops as a kid. Yet choosing to change my career path feels like reclaiming some of the boldness I felt then, the daring of climbing further into the treetop just to see if I can.
I don’t know what my future job will be. There are surely failures and missteps as I figure it out. But there is also certainty that I’m headed in the right direction. There is possibility in committing to daily creative work as a way of exploring new paths. And there is resolve as I write daily toward the goal of finishing a draft of my thesis before the baby comes in February, so I can graduate in May and leap into what lies beyond.
Magic Hour 9
Photographers call dusk the “magic hour”, as the light softens in a way that brings softness and dramatic contrast to the camera lens, and makes us all glow more beautifully.
Here, we walk on a beach just outside Marbella, on a mission to explore new places around this apartment JJ’s parents now have. The water of the Mediterranean felt warm against my bare feet, the sand soft against my toes. A little girl sat, looking into the distance, perhaps dreaming of where she’s from. Three small children dug in the sand, as excited about making a hole as most kids get about a new toy. And JJ and I strolled along, him avoiding rocks, me going up to my knees in the surf, almost losing a flip flop.
The magic hour, on this beach, this evening. In this life, right now.
Magic. Because it’s so soothing and relaxing, like spreading cool lotion on a sunburn, for JJ and I to spend time together, alone, for a couple of days here after three weeks with his parents.
But mostly, magic because I’m pregnant at last! Due in February! We are so, so thrilled. I can’t wait to share more.
Summer at Last 6
Two weeks into a month in Spain and I’m getting my fill of summer. Drinking in the sun and heat like a cat stretches into a slice of morning sunlight. A long weekend at the beach. Cold drinks and sand between my toes. Warm, heavy breezes that turn to passing rainstorms. Breakfast outside in the crisp morning breeze. Mornings in the air-conditioned library working on my thesis. Lunch with the family on the patio. Dinner outside with friends at tables in the plaza, then ice cream at midnight on the bridge over the river. Sleeping night after night with no covers, hot until the morning breeze sets in. Listening to the rise and fall of cicadas. Smelling jasmine and sunscreen and dry grass. Wearing flip-flops and sundresses every day.
Moving to a place with summer is becoming an obsession. Next year: breakfast or dinner on our own patio in July!
Low coastal fog and chilly temperatures 2
I know much of the country is suffering through a heat wave right now, and many places have a serious drought. This is a huge problem and one that should make me feel grateful to be where I am.
But instead I want some heat. Want to sweat and drink tall, cold glasses of lemonade in a sundress. That’s summer! It’s the natural order of things. Temperatures in the ’50s all week in JULY is something else entirely.
It’s COLD, for one. And dark. And oh so depressing. The wind whips by constantly making me shiver in jeans and a WOOL sweater if I open too many windows. In the morning, the brown wood of our back porch is covered in puddles from a night of dripping fog.
Yes, this is currently the top reason I can’t wait to move – anywhere without the constant fog! And why I can’t wait to be in Spain for a month with the in-laws and sweltering 90-degree days.
So for now, I hope you’ll comment with links to your summer blog posts so I can vicariously feel the heat while nestled under a blanket working on my dissertation in SF. And if you’re in a place with a drought, I hope it rains soon!
Shadows and reflections in the city 1
I am determined to move out of this city. At the same time, I am determined to enjoy it now that my mind is made up. And there is little I enjoy more than taking walks with the camera, snapping pictures right and left, getting ice cream with JJ, or coffee, or appetizers at the Ferry Building.
Our first apartment was down by the baseball park, and we often walked along the Embarcadero to the Ferry Building and downtown, taking pictures of the bridge or the old fireboat house, talking about technology and education, or dreaming about the future. “I’ve always wanted to live in San Francisco” I said, “and here we are”. It was so right for that time in our lives.
Now, we’re in our fourth house here, counting a short-term sublet last summer. Six years have gone by, with one away in Barcelona. We’re in a quiet neighborhood, and our house is the bottom floor of a 3-story Victorian, with views of buildings climbing the hills behind, and the brown peaks of the highest point in the city. It’s very quiet for the city, with easy parking, a small back deck, and a garden down below. The neighborhood is clean, and the shops are delightful. There’s a cafe 3 blocks away where I like to go work on my dissertation, or just write.
It’s the nicest place we’ve lived so far. But this summer, I’ve finally realized that as much as I’ve enjoyed living in San Francisco, it’s not home. I am ready to grow roots, but not here. I need to be somewhere that’s warmer, wilder-feeling with more open space. Somewhere where we can own a house, paint the walls any color we want, garden and know it’s ours. I’m not a city girl, it turns out!
So we are talking about moving. And I am trying to make this feel like home in the meantime.
It makes me wonder: When did you feel like you’d really put down roots somewhere? What made you feel that way? Was it children? Buying a house? Getting a job you loved? Something else?