The In-Between

The cats and I are procrastinating.

Truffle and Trollope are the best creatures in the world with whom to while away the minutes, hours, and mornings, because they can convince me, without a doubt, that there is nothing more important to do than to sit in the sun and stroke their warm fur. “Come on, come on,” they stand at my feet and beg until I relinquish my to-do list and my narrow vision of what the day should hold and squander the moment.           

More than ever, I should heed the lessons the felines want to teach me. They never need a Rainy Day Cupboard to help give their empty hours direction. Truffle is unapologetic in her demand that I stop and notice the brilliant sunshine making shapes across the living room floor, and the sound of the wind chimes ringing in the breeze. Trollope is vocal in his desire to have his tummy rubbed right there. No, there. No. Right there. The cats know exactly what they want, and it can be fulfilled at this very moment. Seize the day, they say.

I feel caught between intentions, neither seizing nor resisting. Although the calendar might suggest that summer is in full glorious swing, around here we are in the final days of the season. School began last week in Albuquerque and my school year lesson schedule starts this afternoon. I have just finished my two-week break between teaching sessions. This was a working break, I finally realized, not a vacation. Although I wasn’t teaching, I was practicing for upcoming programs. I caught up on house and garden chores. I saw former students for final visits before they headed back to college. I worked through piles of studio administration tasks: ordering music, setting lesson schedules, sending emails. The cats were unimpressed with my productivity.

While it often feels like I have straitjacketed myself to a life of tangible accomplishments, many days I feel stuck in the drudgery of my own making, and find myself rebelling against the very practices and routines I have created. Instead of making lists of tasks, I doodle on paper, building castles in the air. I want to spend a summer on Vancouver Island, a Christmas in Paris. I want to speak Spanish, learn all of Beethoven’s piano trios and Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Book Two. I’ve always intended to take ballroom dance lessons. I want to paint the dining room chairs green and yellow. Or maybe purple.

One of my problems is my outdated definitions about work and play. Much of the time I have a rigid idea about what constitutes work—practicing and teaching or rehearsing and performing. In other words, activities that might generate income. During the day, while the world toils away, I think that I should be working as well, not playing. No naps with Truffle. No impromptu trips to browse the used bookstore up the street, or to find a good bottle of wine for dinner. It doesn’t seem to matter that my kind of work encourages flexibility in terms of hours and routines, that the very lack of a dictated schedule means I have a certain amount of freedom and options with how I structure my day. Through gritted teeth, I tell myself, See, Cats, I am working. Practice time is not snuggle time.

But despite my determined industriousness, I also know that many days I need to put the play back into playing the piano. I need to discover how to wander a bit aimlessly inside my work. To stop my unyielding practicing long enough to remind myself of Schubert’s dates, to dig out my old practice notes and see what tempo I used to set in the third movement, to put on a recording and dance the Ravel. It occurs to me that it is the act of squandering the moments in between my notes that could most surely send my life in a whole new direction.

This is easier said than done. Everything in our highly productive culture rewards hard work and productivity. To make it worse, I have a lifetime of highly efficient patterns to overcome and I can’t shake the notion that there is a certain set of behaviors that come with being a stable and respectable grown-up. Maybe we inherit these beliefs and attitudes like we inherit the color of our eyes, responsibility and pragmatism winding around the double helix of our DNA, genetically programming us to a lifetime of guilt for not measuring up or being able to account for our time. I have no examples in my life of what a non-traditional career or an unconventional life might look like, no crazy aunt who skipped family reunions to paint landscapes in the southwest, no wild cousin who ran off to Europe with a lover. There are no uncles who stayed up all night throwing pots. No distant relatives who taught English in China or meditated with monks in India.

Instead, my family remains the model of no-nonsense responsibility. On good days and bad ones, we went to work and to church. My grandmothers had children and then taught them to play the piano. They baked casseroles made with cream-of-mushroom soup for Sunday School potluck dinners and joined the PTA. No one hanging off my family tree ever spent his days staring out the window or sitting and following his breath. No one got so absorbed in reading haikus or essays written by Zen teachers that she forgot to call her mother. No one missed days of work to write or paint. Certainly no one would have called writing or painting or even practicing “work.”

Sometimes it is difficult to reconcile what are legitimate dreams and what are only left-over goals on an expired list written by an accomplishment-driven ego. One summer some years ago, I learn to throw pots, something I have always wanted to do. A couple of artis friends had a few pottery wheels in their back yard, “Come learn to throw,” my friend generously offered me.

And so I threw pots, sitting under the overhang of their shed, in a backyard full of trees and animals. They had a dozen chickens, a rabbit who would, from time to time, hop by; several guinea pigs that roamed the grass. I spent hours throwing my beginner attempts at bowls and vases and talking with the two of them about everything under the sun: her childhood on Nantucket, his ill father, our funky neighborhood, our struggles with trying to live a life that supported our artistic sensibilities. They had a lovely slow rhythm that was a perfect counterpart for my fast-paced one. Being there, I could feel my blood pressure drop. It was a perfect few weeks.       

Then, one day I was telling my sister about my introduction into ceramics and I found myself saying that I wasn’t going to continue with the pot-throwing after the summer was over. Until that moment I hadn’t realized that I knew this, but instinctively I did: in an overflowing life, I had to make choices. I loved learning a new skill, I loved the quiet conversation around the wheel, I loved getting my hands in clay and creating something tangible, but when the summer was over I was OK with letting it end. I was thankful I had taken the time to really dive into this activity, but it wasn’t going to become one more obligation on my to-do list, one more thing to cram into my bursting hours. A tiny shift of consciousness had occurred: I realized that my life was full enough.

As another school year begins and the calendar once again begins filling up, I am becoming more and more taken with the idea that our habitual climbing, our hectic productivity, isn’t getting us anywhere I want to be. I don’t want to chase down another accomplishment or check off another rung on the career ladder. I want to stop spinning and start sitting still for long periods of time, staring at the lavender waving in the breeze. I want to grab onto my wish list and then let it go, unattached. I want to erase my definitions of work and play and dance comfortably in the margins in between. I want to spend more time in the garden watching the hollyhocks grow. Under my desk, the cats nap in the sunshine. Somewhere a screen door bangs.