Again and again and again
What a mess. Wouldn’t you know it that two days after sweeping my patio, the storm of the decade would come along, burying it and the rest of the back yard in two feet of twigs and branches.
A person visiting my back yard now wouldn't even know I have a patio.
But what can I do? Life is full of storms — meteorological and otherwise, predictably turning order into chaos and undoing progress on every front. We are doomed to go back and do the same things again.
Six months ago, I finally had a tooth that had lost a filling fixed. After congratulating myself for braving a visit to the dentist and getting the work done, the filling broke off again.
Two years ago, I had my gallbladder removed to try to put an end to bouts of wrenching pancreatitis attacks. The gallbladder was diseased, so I sighed in relief at having gotten rid of it. But a few months later the attacks returned with greater vehemence. So I had to go back and reluctantly resume my odyssey through the labyrinthine medical system.
About four years ago, I left my copy desk job at the Enterprise-Record and moved into the Style section to focus on my first love — writing. Three years later the job was eliminated and I had to go back to the desk and, except for my column “But this is Chico” and this blog, put my writing aside.
I’ve had longtime relationships fray. I try and try to mend them and think I've succeeded, only to have them unravel again.
There are things I do every day that hardly qualify as storms, yet contribute to my conviction that, as The Red Queen said to Alice in “Through the Looking Glass,” “Now, here, you see. It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. To get somewhere else you have to run twice as fast.”
Leave a garden untended for just a month and it will become a jungle, even without a storm to mess it up.
Then there are dirty dishes and clothes to wash, whiskers to shave, bills to pay, e-mails and phone messages to answer, children and pets to feed, broken stuff to fix — again and again and again.
Nowadays, you hear a lot of people assert “I’m a doer, I’m a problem-solver.” That’s good to hear because there are always things to do and there are so many problems that come to us unbidden.
I like to call myself a thinker and a dreamer, but I spend surprisingly little of my time in those hallowed states. When I’m not doing something that will keep me in the same place, I’m either planning for it or recovering from it.