Wonderfully Unproductive

White dog hair floats amidst the keyboard. I look down to see two large pup eyes, sleepily open and staring at me. Unamused by my focus on a screen, the pup lays under my legs that are propped up on my father’s coffee table.

Winter birds, cardinals, titmice, and juncos are flitting about the snow. Every time they hop, the strong breeze carries them a bit off their course. Their intent is to enjoy the suet and seed that we’ve placed around the house.

All this life, active around me, and here I sit. I’m unsure, yet restless too. What to focus on? What to do? What really matters? Who I am? Who should I be? Sometimes I’m around slightly younger people, and I recall a different version of myself. One less driven; more focused on “the important things in life.” Finding love, taking adventures, enjoying every moment of every day…those were the things that occupied my mind. Here, now, I’m thinking about marketing strategies, what would make a compelling story, how to grow my team. It wakes me at 3:00 a.m. and keeps my mind running until the early afternoon. Ah, but isn’t this too what I wanted. To have a job I care so deeply about that I can’t stop thinking about it. Manifest destiny. Now, through the rosy glasses of hindsight, I yearn for the times of struggle. Yet it’s not yearning for the entirety of those times. I don’t wish for the drafty studio apartments, the unworthiness, the sadness of wanting more than I could provide for myself. What I actually want is the freedom.

Sometimes when I’m home, I look upon our eight acres, “ah so much opportunity.” And, then I sit back and let the world feed my thoughts with consumerism, endlessly scrolling at the examples of what I could be. There’s a different sort of pain below the surface. The pain of failure, or potential failure. The fear of actually getting what’s wanted.

To let my mind empty onto a page, the vulnerability of it is stupid yet true. To be ridiculed, admired, replicated in satire. To be successful, to change, to become and lose different parts of myself. As if the skin of this being can only hold so much. So the electrons firing keep firing and immobilize all else.

Yet I try.

In different ways, and not often enough, I try. Yesterday, I stared out the window, as my pup does, and let myself just be. A rising memory-or rather an average of memories. As a child, without the distraction of the internet, without company, I would gaze upon the landscape for hours. Thinking or not thinking. Sometimes watching; sometimes staring at no particular thing. It was peace. It was calm. It was…wonderfully unproductive.

Sometimes I wonder if this American lifestyle will kill me and my fellow citizens. On second thought, I know it will.