TUESDAYS

Yesterday was long. Not super hard just long.

I went to where we practice music which is like a 30 min drive across town, was there 30 min and the drummer came in and said he had to go (meaning so did I). I fumbled through playing him a song I've been working on but it fell flat.

It was frustrating and with the end of the day put things towards the negative as I drove home .

This isn't uncommon. You can only be "on" for so long in a given day. Or half a day or whatever. Eventually the cup that runneth over, runneth out.

On the way home I ran through a few vocal exercises, trying to salvage something decent from the trip and was only meagerly encouraged.

Stress. Accumulates. Best laid plans fall away when life gets in the way.  I know this is okay. I am learning to let go a little. To call it a day and like I told a friend some 17 years ago when he asked how I continued with such energy. "Every day I wake up and agree to fight the good fight."  I still don't have a definitive on what the fight is, but I know it when I'm doing it. You know it. It's that "agreeing to start again" thing I talk about ad nauseam.

This morning I awoke and was humming still. Not a tune. The stress/anxiety hum. The one that can eat through the dopamine release of a run and stop you dead in your tracks two miles from home. "What am I missing? What am I forgetting? What's going to get me this weekend?"  I know it's nothing, just as I know it's everything.

//

This morning after the perfunctory. Wordle, coffee, morning visiting with my wife, a quick look at the stupidity of most news, I decide to read.

I have eight books by my bed. One read twice (Chuck Klosterman's, The 90's) and seven others I've read a combined 60 pages of. I sometimes think the internet has ruined reading, just as I type this for you to read on the internet. I don't mean I'm watching videos in lieu of, I mean the duration of the information we read has shrunk. "Too long. Didn't read.", an actual meme. The things I write, victims. Much more than 500 words and you're out. It's too much. It's all. Too much.

I give in to resistance and open an truly random article and am rewarded. It's an interview about an interviewer who ends up actually interviewing the actual interviewer. There's a John Steinbeck quote in it. I've never read anything by him. It's good and it resonates with the dichotomy of me. How I want attention, accolades, recognition, while at the same time it makes my skin squirm. It speaks to my want to make others better. Through everything.

“It is so easy to give,” John Steinbeck wrote in his Log from the Sea of Cortez, “so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it be well done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness. It requires humility and tact and great understanding of relationships. In receiving you cannot appear, even to yourself, better or stronger or wiser than the giver, although you must be wiser to do it well.”

If I apply the above to me, I receive an F+.

I continue the piece and then see another quote.

"Jean Carroll will give you sage advice because she knows, as few do, how to receive and, by that, be truly generous. “The answer is in what people ask,” she has told me. “They already know what is best for them. All I do is point it out.”"

It too resonates as I realize that part of what I'm good at is the seeing and pointing out. Not yet complete silver linings of a saved morning. Of not letting the day before roll into the next and the next and the next.

That's the trick. Figuring out how to stop the humming. The acceleration.  To slow.

//

I swear I sound so repetitive some times but it's because I don't know anything else more simple than it. It can be hard but it works.

Starting.

The pro version is starting clean. To wipe away the end of a Tuesday. To agreeing to ease into the day and be aware of the pace at which you're starting.

To saying "It's Wednesday, it's going to be a good day."

Realizing 757 words in.

That it's Thursday.

#hugsandhi5s