Annie Dillard wrote an essay entitled "The Present" in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In this piece, she implores: "These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present."
This is my goal. Especially as of late. I have come to the realization that, in my desperate attempt to have a life full of meaningful experiences, I have actually been missing them. I rush from one thing to the next filling a punch-card rather than living a full life. I have to do everything. Be everywhere. All at once. I have been looking back, trying to write down important moments in my life and I feel like I have a very shallow reservoir of memories. I don't know if there's some deep, dark Freudian reason I have blocked them all out...or if I have simply been too busy to remember.
Part of this busy life is not my fault. I think it stems naturally from being poor. My family never had much money. And then I went and got married when I was 20 and had even less. Poor kids don't get to luxuriate in the college experience. They get to work for food and rent and take 18 credits a semester to avoid paying for an extra one and hope they don't run out of money before they get a degree. So, in my desperate attempt to get everything I wanted out of college and keep my head above water, I ran myself ragged. I really had no choice. But I do now.
My husband has a reliable, grown-up job that can mostly pay the bills (with my part-time efforts supplementing things). We have never before experienced the growth of our savings account. It's a remarkable thing. I'm not saying that we no longer stress about money (by any means). Our measly little bank account is probably less than many middle-class Americans spend on their family vacations. But I'm saying that I do not hyperventilate daily about how our bills will be paid. And, hopefully, that will afford me some time and energy to practice living in the present.
Another author whose thoughts on the here and now has been coming to mind lately: Thoreau's pledge to "live deliberately" has always resonated with me.
In Walden, Thoreau writes:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life...
That is what I long for. Living deliberately. Sucking the marrow out of life. Well, that is a slightly more carnivorous version of what I hope to do. My greatest fear is the discovery "that I had not lived." And this blog is supposed to help keep me in check. My goal is to write about everything. Seriously. Because I feel like my memory has atrophied. And I need to stretch it.
It makes me think of the movie "Harriet the Spy" that I was fairly obsessed with for a period of time in junior high. She and her notebook are inseparable and there is one point in the movie when she says, "I wanna see the world, and write down everything!" And my little heart would swell at the thought of that. So, I donned my best spy-esque "trench coat" (I think it might have been a rain coat, actually...) and, pen in hand, stalked around the aisles of my parents' grocery store, observing people.
Anyway, now I'm rambling. So, I leave you with more Dillard until next time:
"...beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there."
from "Heaven and Earth in Jest" within Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
