Dear Neets,
Here I sit on the back porch, absorbing Gorgonzola on crackers and sipping a Between the Sheets. I have switched on the (in Australian English: fairy) lights that make our back porch here in suburban Canberra seem almost magical, and am trying to switch off the messages I speak to myself in the privacy of my own mind. I am coming to recognize the things I say to myself are faulty and, frankly, unhealthy for me. Funny I could come home from a day of solid, intense work from 10 (got there late because I had to be here for the workman to do some repairs; I would have started at 8:15 and worked just as hard) to 6:10 feeling, I just now recognized, like I’m some unemployed slacker now home with a long to-do list I’ve hung over my head, Damocles-like, incessant, unrelenting. How can this be? I just put in a focused, lunch-wolfed-at-the-desk, forget-checking-mail-or-taking-a-lunchtime-walk sort of day, and now here I’m berating myself for wasting time this evening, not doing one of a couple dozen or more things on my to-do list. Then I realized the false gospel I was preaching, oh so winsomely, to myself soI mixed the drink, pulled out the cheese, dragged my Mac to the veranda here and, surrounded by the colored lights, started writing this note to you, my dear, sweet bride.
Where did I get this obsession, this drive, this crazy definition of a life correctly, righteously, spent as a life of constant “accomplishment?” I am starting, with great difficulty, to identify my own voice inside my head and recognize it for what it is: an arbitrary, petty despot defining for myself, in my own homemade little bubble, what’s right and wrong. And I guess the point of this is my recognition that this is a definition I have the magical power, if I’d just grant it to myself, to change.
I’m going to go make myself some supper now, including a brilliant Caprese salad with home grown tomatoes and basil. I may watch a “West Wing” while I eat. Wish you were here to share it all with me.
