No Time to Waste

I've wasted a lot of time in my life just sitting here thinking that I'm wasting a lot of time.  I've spent hours worrying about what I'm not doing and wondering about what I should be doing.  Sometimes I try to convince myself that it's okay because at least I'm thinking about it and not just letting life pass without even noticing.  But that's really not okay.  Noticing is a step in the right direction.   But thinking about it instead of doing something about it can hardly be applauded.

I've never really been able to explain how I feel about my idleness.  And I'm sure no one has ever really been able to understand. When I complain, their usual response is, "You do more than anyone I know."   This makes me think the people they know must be real losers.  I've dug a lot of students out of their holes.  Sometimes all it takes is the Nike slogan.  When I'm in my encouraging mode I often feel strong and think, "I'm ready.  I have to listen to myself.  I can do it, too."  But in the end, the students are the only ones that make the changes.  They send me thank you notes and they start living.  I'm proud of myself for having helped, but disappointed that I'm still stuck.

When I went to Paris a couple of months ago, a friend invited me to Auvers for the day to visit the house and town where van Gogh spent the last 70 days of his life.  I was never a big van Gogh fan, but I seldom turn down an invitation.  (Remember?  I do more than anyone you know.)  There's no reason to miss an opportunity to learn more about an important artist, see a new town and speak bad French and bad English with an old friend all day.

Van Gogh lived in a small room above a cafe.  It's since been turned into a museum which consists of a restaurant, the original staircase to get up to his small, empty room, another empty room with a short video presentation, and an unoriginal staircase to get back down to the large gift shop.  

Although I appreciate receiving my Monet umbrella, Gauguin pencil and Prendergast bookmark, I've never been much of a gift shop shopper myself.  Fortunately, Olivier is.  As we were leaving, he bought me a book called Van Gogh's Letters, the Mind of the Artist in Paintings, Drawings, and Words, 1875-1890.

On the night train back to Italy I started reading my souvenier and found the perfect words to describe what I've only ever been able to call "wasting time."

July 1880
I would be very pleased if you could see me as something other than a kind of idler.  

Because there are quite different kinds of idler.  There is the man who is idle from laziness and lack of character, from the baseness of his nature.  You can, if you like, take me for one of those.

Then there is the other kind of idler, who is idle despite himself, who is consumed inwardly by a great desire for action, but who does nothing, because it is impossible to do anything, because it is as if he were imprisoned in some way, because he lacks what he needs to be productive, because inevitable circumstances have reduced him to this.  Such a man does not always know himself what he could do, but he feels instinctly:  nevertheless I am good at something, I can sense a reason for my existence!  I know that I could  be quite a different man!  How could I be useful, what could I do?  There is something within me, but what is it?

That is quite a different kind of idler.  You can, if you like, take me for one of those.

(And you can stop reading here, if you like, because that explains the way I feel.
But you can continue reading here, if you like, to find the solution.)

A bird in a cage in spring knows quite well that there is something he would be good at, he feels strongly that there is something to be done, but he can't do it.  What is it?  He can't quite remember, then he gets some vague ideas, and says to himself, "The others are building their nests and producing their young and raising their brood."  Then he bangs his head against the bars of the cage.  And the cage is still there, and he is mad with grief.

"There's a lazybones," says another bird who is passing.  "He's comfortably off."  However, the prisoner lives and does not die, nothing shows on the outside of what is going on inside him.  He is in good health, he is more or less cheerful while the sun shines.  Then the migration season comes, and a bout of melancholy.  "But," say the children who look after him in his cage, "he has everything he needs."  Yet for him it means looking out at the swollen, stormy skies and feeling the revolt against his fate within himself.  "I am in a cage, I am in a cage, and so I lack nothing, fools!  I have everything I need!  Oh, for pity's sake, give me freedom, to be a bird like other birds."

That idle fellow is like that idle bird.

You can't always say what it is that shuts you up, what walls you in, what seems to bury you alive, but you still feel some kind of bars, some kind of cage, some kind of walls.  

Is all this imagination, fantasy?  I don't think so; and then I ask myself:  My God, is it for long, is it forever, is it for eternity?

Do you know what makes the prison disappear?  It is every deep, genuine affection.  To be friends, brothers, to love, that opens the prison by its sovereign power, its powerful charm.  Someone who does not have that remains bereft of life.    
-Vincent van Gogh    

That leaves this 8th Grade Queen, this don't-go-to-bed-til-there's-nothing-else-to-do college girl, this smile- spreading-old-people's-home Social Director, this Halloween-Christmas-New Year's party thrower, this come-have-dinner-at-my-red-picnic-table hostess and this annual beach party organizer with no choice but to keep trying to break through the cages and break down the walls on her quest for some real Italian friends, because she's not the type to remain bereft of life.