I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
Last Sunday I wrote about releasement, the Eckhartian and Heideggerian idea of releasing control and practicing a radical openness to what is and what might be. And then I proceeded to live in releasement, not consciously though. I look back over the week and I realize I did it without meaning to do it.
To practice releasement you have to let go of your will, set it aside, even as you are trying to let it go and set it aside. How do you do that? How can you let go of your will without using your will? It’s a paradox.
Maybe you do what I did. Write about releasement, take it up as an idea, and then just go about your days. Show up each moment where you are, with the people and animals you’re with, and do the next right thing. Be totally present for whatever happens, including any inspiration or motivation you have to do something useful.
I have been working every day on pet portraits. I’m planning to give each of my sisters and each of my children paintings of pets as Christmas gifts. Then I’m going to turn all the pet portraits into a set of printed notecards to give to my parents. They have a lot of grandpets and even a couple great grandpets!
I haven’t written a to do list for this or made a list of which pets I’m going to paint and who is going to get which painting. I’m just getting up each day, sorting through photos of pets, printing some out, and then launching into a painting. So far I have three largely completed and one in process.
I am pleased with the results. And even more pleased that I’m creating art without enslaving myself to a plan.
I’ve found that’s the best way to get things done. I’m not good at driving myself to do things I don’t want to do.
This Thursday I’m flying to North Carolina to meet up with a friend. She and I are then driving back to Colorado where she’ll be living with me through the holidays to be near her father, who has an advanced cancer.
I love being retired so that I can do things like this without any question of scheduling or taking vacation time.
I confessed to some friends this morning, “I guess I’m completely retired from technology now.”
I hadn’t admitted it to myself until now. Six months ago I was still thinking I might go back. Now I’ve put it behind me forever. I probably ought to delete my LinkedIn account.
Retirement is a kind of releasement. Releasing ambition and achievement. Setting aside financial worries and instead trusting in the universe to provide. Learning to love living each day as it arrives, not planning or controlling what I will do when and how.
Last night, I discovered Kierkegaard’s idea of repetition, communicated in his 1843 work of philosophical fiction Repetition. Kierkegaard offers the practice of repetition as an antidote to simple routine or seeking constant novelty (the aesthetic life). It is a way of “recollecting forwards,” taking the past and making it relevant and meaningful in the present, and for the future. Repetition is the act of freely choosing something again–a commitment, a relationship, a way of living–so that it becomes alive in the present, not just a habit or a memory.
M.G. Piety writes that it is helpful to understand repetition in the language in which Kierkegaard formulated it:
The Danish term for “repetition” is gentagelsen (or Gjentagelsen in 19th-century Danish). It’s a compound expression made by combining at tage (“to take”) with the prefix gen, that itself comes from the adverb igen (which means “again”). So gentagelse literally means “to take again.” And that, in a nutshell is what, I would argue, it means for Kierkegaard. The book Repetition is essentially about temporality, about how time flows unceasingly onward, wresting from us every precious moment of our existence like an irresistible tidal force that consigns them immediately to the unrecoverable ocean of the past. It is about how time, unchecked, in a sense deprives us of our lives. We swim furiously toward the future in an effort to save ourselves. But the effort exhausts us, so that we are finally swallowed up by the waves.
Kierkegaard’s repetition is a way of being in the world, affirming our past in the present, by choosing again based on what happened in the past. Instead of going forward with ignorance and without attention to our past, we choose again with more wisdom, more knowledge of what was lovely and what was terrible, and more understanding of ourselves.
My pet paintings are an act of repetition. I have been painting now very regularly for at least ten years, and thinking about learning to paint for far longer than that. While I have never had the thought, “I am going to become a professional painter of pets,” I have regularly made attempts to paint companion animals, for my own joy and to provide joy to other people. Now by painting pets in a bigger project (that of creating a whole series of pet paintings), inspired by my past paintings of pets, I am practicing repetition.
I remember a sunny day more than ten years ago when I was sitting at Keawakapu Beach in Maui. I took up a stick, and I lazily drew a doodle in the wet sand. It was a spiral, and I remember sensing that the spiral was a message from outside myself, saying: your life will not proceed forward in a straight line. It will keep spiraling back upon itself.
I’ve been trying for a while to make sense of my creative rhythms, that I take up one thing for a while, and then take up another, and then only later come back to what I worked on first. I’ve been writing fragments of my Things Men Gave Me memoir for a decade, since the stories in it began. Shouldn’t I have it finished by now?
Recognizing that it is a spiral, and that I will come back to what I’ve set down, makes me feel more confident. I’m not simply forgetting about things. I’m not procrastinating. I’m not lazy. I’m engaging in my own version of repetition, combined with releasement: releasing the feeling I must do something now, finish something now, and instead releasing my fate to the universe.