Step 1: Leave home and note how you feel about returning.
I’m in a very pleasant room at this moment. It’s 6:00 as I type this sentence. I have coffee before me, breakfast on the griddle, sunshine peeking through a sunroof, some nice writing equipment sitting on a lovely marble-ish island in a – well, very pleasant – great room of a house – hardly a Detroit tracthouse, not really a McMansion, just a nice house in a nice neighborhood on the outskirts of what is probably a nice city.
And I just caught myself studying a calendar of the month of June…
…and then pacing around the lovely kitchen doing elementary arithmetic in my head.
“Let’s see…if I’ve been here nine days, and there’s twelve days to go … that means I’ve been here three-eighths – No! Three-sevenths! Of the total time. Right? Before I can go home.”
Point is I’m not exactly being tortured. I could even be doing a lot more stuff than I’m doing. It’s hot in the middle of the day, sure, ridiculously hot, but it’s not hot at the moment and I could be out getting all the exercise I want. Tomorrow I’ll probably saddle up and go to the stores again because I’ve run out of the “exotic” stuff I bought last week. Not looking forward to it. I’m aware that I’m pissing away time that Claire would be all using for contemplative stuff – she’d have had the answers to half the world’s spiritual conundra neatly tied in a bow by now – but I’m dividing my time between reading old ebooks, watching old movies, staring out windows, alternately messing up and scrubbing the kitchen, and pacing and fretting. I’m like that unhappy monk who knows he’s supposed to be a contemplative but really truly isn’t.
Yes, I’m whining about nothing – but my purpose really isn’t even to whine: I’m happy to be here, happy to be doing a solid for a friend, happy to be experiencing ease and air conditioning and daily hot showers and still to be pining to return to my grubby scrounged hand-made Lair. There have been two other occasions since I got settled into the Gulch where I came to the city, experienced its pleasures, and practically ran screaming back home. My opinion is confirmed: I am where I belong, and how many people can say that? When I was a middle-aged businessman away on travel, I dreaded going home because home sucked. Now I can’t wait, because home is paradise and paradise needs a coat of paint on its new porch roof. I perceive that as success. And it’s well worth three weeks out of my so-busy schedule to re-confirm.
Before you leave for home, make a list of all this “exotic” stuff you are liking and add it to a box to return with you.
Joel, you are a lucky guy to be in your paradise.
patrick
Patrick , I lived on a sailboat in the late 70’s caught a ride all the way across the country to visit my mother in Frisco …spent a month there and even though I wandered around in the Cali mountains and just generally relaxed was I ever glad to be back on that old boat…no place like home however humble.
Yup, big alarm bells should be going off in your head when you dread going home and in my case, add, gleefully going to work.
Building your own care package is a great idea!
Joel
How close are you to hardware, supplies and tools? Those are things you should be scoping out for current and future projects back on the
ranch, er I mean secret lair.“Sun comin’ up, I got cakes on the griddle”…
Now that’s stuck in somebody’s head, I bet. My work here is done.
“Life ain’t nothin’ but a funny, funny fiddle” . . .
Next!
😉
Thank God I’m a country boy. Er, person.
Yup it is Tennessee Budd.
” . . . funny, funny RIDDLE . . . ”
Geeze.
We really need to establish a TUAK smite system for people who implant John Denver earworms. He’s dead, we should forgive him all his dimwitted songs we loved when we were in our twenties and just let him lay.
I think I’ve got it: *you’re* who Ian got to dog-sit for him while he’s off gallivanting around Scotland w/ the Mrs! 😀
🙂 Nope.