After services on Shabbat morning, Roger, a much younger man, asked me, “what are you doing now?” He didn’t ask me “what are you working on?” the question my colleagues and I always asked one another when we hadn’t seen each other for a while. We assumed that of course the other was preparing a paper, a talk, a book, collecting or analyzing data, and so forth. But the truth of the matter is these days I’m not working on anything: I’m writing no book, I’m writing no paper, I’m collecting no data, I’m taking no notes. Perhaps intuiting this, Roger asked me not “what are you working on?” but “what are you doing?”
“Visiting doctors,” I told him, which was true but only partially so, since that week I had seen only two. Recognizing the feebleness of my reply, I added that I prepare occasional commentaries on the bible portion of the week (I had prepared two in the past two weeks) and that I’m writing a blog. I didn’t tell him that I also write a weekly letter to each of our two children, each letter a little essay that sometimes finds its way, transformed, into my blog.
My response to Roger’s question made me feel bad, like a slacker, as if I spend my days on a park bench, dozing in the sun. The fact is I’m very busy. For six days a week I have few idle moments, unless you count the time spent walking in Prospect Park for exercise. Except on Shabbat, I read little of the Times. I rarely watch television. Two Netflix CDs have been sitting next to our television set, unopened and unwatched, for at least six months.
Why am I accomplishing so little? I’ve added more household tasks to my routine since retiring, I probably work more slowly than I once did, e-mail gobbles up more time now than it did when I was working, and I spend much more time in doctors’ offices and in submitting to medical tests than formerly. Those changes would account in part for my accomplishing so little at the end of each day. I wish that performing everyday tasks like folding laundry and balancing checkbooks counted as accomplishments, but since these are taken for granted, the background of everyday life for most of us, I can scarcely list these among my activities.
I might not feel like such a slouch if some of my friends and colleagues, the same age as I or older, were not still writing and editing books. When I ask them what they’re working on, they have a ready answer. Perhaps I should dream up another answer to Roger’s question, an answer that would sound as if I’m accomplishing something but at the same time be true. For in response to the question about what I’m doing now, the answer “nothing much” won’t do.
But it occurs to me just now that the five essays that I write each a week plus the occasional bible commentary I produce are not "nothing much." They're a reasonably respectable accomplishment for an octogenarian, who's fully entitled to spend his time on a park bench, his face turned to the sun. So the next time Roger or someone else asks me what I'm doing, I'll tell them what I'm doing and not feel bad about it.
2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved
2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved
When I was in the fifth grade in elementary school, I remember the teacher reading to us Rudyard Kipling's, "IF," which contains the following:
ReplyDelete"If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!"
Of course, Kipling included a lot more tests to determine manhood, and I thought I would never achieve them all. But the last one (quoted above) stuck with me as the most crucial of all. My father worked almost incessantly, even half a day on Sundays. I wanted to be like him, but thought I hadn't a chance.
But what Daddy didn't tell me that it is important not only to DO, but also simply to BE. And judging by your blog, Anchises, you're doing very well at that, and pleasing a lot of people in the process.
I wouldn't worry about it.