Sometimes when I return home from having fulfilled my duties, obligations, and desires in the larger world I feel completely discombobulated. Fried, distant, mute. I sit and try to quiet the inner struggle between harnessing my usual calm and acting on an invasive sense of urgency. Clearly, I am not cut out for tasks, for problem solving, or for responsibilities that extend beyond my own sense of value and importance. Don't mistake this for selfishness, though as an only child I'm sure I'm often guilty of that, too. If it must have a title, which in an age of expediency, consumption, and job identity I assume it must, I'm comfortable with being accused of a mild case of good old fashioned laziness. Or maybe Malvina Reynolds sang it best when she proudly crooned, "I don't mind failing in this world."
Plainly, I don't aspire. Not to status or power or money or a job title that makes people turn green with envy. I don't even necessarily aspire to be a master of the things I love (gardening, writing, cooking, dancing). In fact, I think a degree of authenticity and joy is lost in pursuit of creating or performing perfectly. Through my frustration, I find it kind of thrilling to wonder if that one roma tomato that is rotting on its bottom will spoil the whole vine, and I've retained enough optimism to believe that it won't.
Having just attained my Bachelors degree, regulars at work and friends of the family love to ask what I plan for the future. When I mention graduate school I'm further pressed to name what spectacularly lucrative career path I'll choose with my educational background. And that is when I laugh and admit, "Probably none." I'm often met with a rolling eye (usually stuck behind a computer screen or flecked with jadedness and impervious skepticism), cordially reminded that if we all felt like I do about the world, nothing would get done. Understood. I should take this moment to thank every last person that goes through the motions of a job they despise, tolerates people that secretly unnerve them, or labors over the hard problems in the interest of the common good. We are all that person at one time or another, and it is certainly a noble and difficult thing to be. I should then also apologize for not being willing to burden myself with things that make me miserable when at all avoidable. My motivations are not such that it's necessary to toil and drudge. When I have no choice but to bite the bullet and muddle through something intolerable, I am also intolerably sorry for the unmotivated, grumpy person I become. My hat is sincerely off to anyone who lives life that way, regardless of the reason they do it.
Here is the part where I fully admit to selfishness; I am writing this from my deck, on a still evening with a mild breeze and a muted, almost white sun that is incandescently veiled by thin grey clouds. It is just me and my plants, and a couple of culinary magazines that will guide my dinner preparations. Oh, and a glass of wine. A small one, I promise, because it is only 5:30. I have done absolutely nothing for the last two and a half hours aside from laying motionless in the mid-day sun, admiring the height of my lavender, congratulating my oregano on a most spectacular scent, and occasionally picking up a magazine or the fourth volume of Anais Nin's diaries (I read one volume every summer to retrain my romantic senses after a long dark winter). What I don't earn in money I pay myself in leisure, and a fabulous dinner.
Here is the part where I am unselfish again; my basil plants need me. Without my epicurean fortitude their brilliant green leaves, which are now so bushy that they conceal an intricate system of 18 inch stalks, would begin to yellow at the base and wither all around. Each morning they greet me with the buds of little flowers extended in over-achievement, and each morning I pinch the foreboding blossoms and toss them over the rail, asking the overburdened herb to make it just one more day. Spicy, Italian, and Lime have all obliged, though growing more top heavy and crowded with each new dawn. It is with their best interest at heart that I plan on spending my evening in the kitchen whipping up pestos of all ethnicities and influences from their pruned leaves.
At heart, my basil is a lot like me. Unwilling to grow so tall that it puts stress on its very foundation, in tune with the capacity of its roots to live and work and grow before dying altogether. And the really interesting thing about the nature of my basil is that the more I trim it back, save it from its own show of hubris, the faster it comes back; fuller, greener, and with larger, more fragrant leaves.
Our symbiosis far more enriching than that of the anxious laborer to the relentlessly laborious. And so, I make time to shed the furrowed brow and elevated heart rate that characterize importance, immediacy, and productivity, in favor of the nothing-in-particular, the whatever-comes-my-way, a languid state of existing wholly within the senses.
Good things always come.
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