Here’s another in the series of excerpts from With Malice Toward Some:
Oct 7th
The days melt away like cough drops on the tongue. I brush my hair and take a long walk and type out Henry’s notes and stand for a while in the garden composing my face to look like a Landed Gent, and ping! the day is gone. The Devonshire countryside grows upon me like an obsession; I sometimes suspect that somebody has given me a philtre. Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife. Whenever you have definitely made up your mind to send her to a home for morons, she turns her heart-stopping profile and you are unstrung and victimized again. The garden still spurts roses and snapdragons and Michaelmas daisies, which I cut and arrange at great length in bowls and vases. This pursuit I estimate to be about the sheerest waste of time I have ever indulged in. The flowers wilt and only have to be done all over again. Henry, being a native New Yorker, looks pained if his attention is called to flowers. And the flowers in the garden are virtually forcing the house right off the property as it is, without my introducing them into the drawing room to bore from within. But it is principally because it is so fruitless that I like to do it. It makes every day feel like Saturday afternoon.
— from With Malice Toward Some by Margaret Halsey
I’m thinking a lot about the difference between relaxation and rest. I’m a champion relaxer: I know how to kick back, share a bottle of wine and talk for hours; spend an hour on the deck with a book; fall so deep into a movie that I forget where I am; sit on a park bench and stare at Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains beyond while crows and seagulls spiral up and down from the beach. I know how to enjoy these moments.
But I don’t know how to rest. I spend my life doing: it’s my response to responsibility (whoa! just made the linguistic connection…), to stress, to challenge, to learning. To life, really. I’m good at doing; but it turns out I have very little skill at stopping. I relax, but in a little back corner of my mind I am already figuring out the next process, making the next mental list, preparing to do the next thing.
I’m lucky; the busy-ness of my life is not the treadmill variety. I like my life; but it is full, and I have a lot to do, and somewhere along the line I learned that my culture won’t give me a lot of slack for “wasting” time. For just spending a hundred Saturday-afternoon-days in a row arranging flowers or sitting under an umbrella on the beach at Musha Cay — those cuffy thing moments that I find I am yearning for more and more these days. I want to do fruitless things just because they are lovely to do. I want the beautiful surroundings just because they are beautiful, and then I want to simply sit and be in them with no responsibility to anyone, not even myself. I want to unhook from all of that results-oriented list-bound doing.
I’m good at being. But always I am being in motion. Now a part of me just wants to be still.
Yes, I have wished that my “culture” would reward me for just being…
I could hear the buzz of bees in that garden and smell that particularly English scent and hear that old childhood drone that only seemed to occur in summer, of a small plane passing overhead.
I’ve been unemployed now since the end of March and will be moving away from a place that I sometimes can believe was designed exactly to my dream of the perfect place to live. It does fill my senses – but it doesn’t nurture me in a practical sense. I have always struggled to find employment here, hence the foray into mining exploration.
I’m going “back” to Victoria, specifically the Mornington Peninsula where my son, Keegan, still lives. He’s excited and happy. I’m kind of struggling with that whole going back concept. Not to mention the practical – packing up again and moving interstate.
I enjoyed standing still for a moment in that soft, scent-filled garden…
I can definitely relate to this. I have my next ten moves lined up and am preparing to execute them. It’s hard for me to stop and do nothing, even when I am relaxing (and I do relax a lot).
But I did, not too many lifetimes ago, take an entire year to do nothing productive, nothing planned, nothing that may have gotten me anywhere in my career or furthered my education or looked good on my resume or made my parents proud. I enjoyed the experience immensely. I couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been alone in every sense: no contact with my family or old friends, no lovers, no partners — just me and sometimes not even me. In a way, I had to lose all previous reference to what mattered, what was expected of me, what I thought I ought to do with my time and mind, the responsibilities that came with all the privileges I’ve been given in life.
I’m not sure it’s fair to put the people who care about me through the Cone of Silence, so I probably won’t be doing the no-contact thing again. I would, however, love to find my way back to that place of rest every once in a while without having to cut the phone and email lines and move to another country where I can reinvent myself and my priorities. Balance would be good, balance and pause to just ‘be’ without having to ‘become’ anything for myself or others.
I find the things I do to be restful. Not the “work” I’m paid for, but those things I’m listing to do while at work – watering the tiny Oak trees I’m growing for someone else to enjoy in their 40’s; talking to my tomato plants (thanks Nicola!); pulling weeds; oranizing my tools in the basement. These actions more than “relaxing” bring silence to the otherwise constant chirping in the back of my head – I didn’t have it until we moved out into the “country” – on to 50 some acres of forest and swamp and old pasture, in to this old mouse infested house with a detached garage! Stillness arrived with 1,000 little things to do.
Another great passage from that book.
I can relate to this too, and I think about it more and more lately. Odd though that I have the words switched in my mind. I feel like I am very good at resting. Like I do it way too much. But I rarely ever completely relax because I’m thinking of all the things I should be doing. And THEN after I get that endless list of things finished, I’ll be able to truly relax. And that relaxing might not include actual resting – physical resting. For instance relaxing for me might include a hike. The thing is I never feel fully rested or relaxed because of that list.
I can’t even see something beautiful and just enjoy it. I think, ‘I should take a picture of this’. Last night I made it home in time to sit out side and watch an unusually beautiful sunset. but I couldn’t just sit there, I had to go get my camera even though I wasn’t in a good spot for photos.
And I think that I (and most of us) don’t get enough sleep. And it is making me age faster than necessary (among other things).
I want to stop and smell the roses more often.
The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous.
Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living