The Shape of My Days

     For years my days were shaped by the academic calendar. When the teaching came to an abrupt end, suddenly my days lacked any shape at all. I missed teaching. I missed being around young people and learning what they think. I missed the classroom and the challenge of teaching students how to write with graceful prose, how to apply critical thinking, how to recognize creditable sources. Teaching was my tiny contribution towards a better world. Even though I only taught two days a week, my days were shaped by grading papers, preparing syllabi, and brainstorming lessons in addition to the time in the classroom.

    I never worried about the shape of my days after I retired because, after all, I had been a part-time writer as well as a part-time teacher, a career that left me time to do other things, too: reading, sewing, hiking, backpacking, cross-country skiing. But then I was forced to retire. Suddenly my days were shapeless. It wasn't so much that I didn't know what to do with my time as that I felt my usefulness in life had been snatched out from under me. The days were turning into an amorphous blob.

    Gradually I learned how to give shape to my days, mostly by creating challenges for myself. How hard could I hike? Could I do seventy-five things of seventy-five repetitions each in one year? 

    Then Mike stepped into my life, and I began to shape my days around him. When we decided to get married, we agreed we would not live together day after day and night after night (after all these years? not a good idea). Nonetheless, my days were shaped by this relationship. And I loved their shape. 

    We can order our lives only to a certain extent. A year after our wedding, my husband died. I came home to my own house to learn how to reshape my days, this time around grief. I felt the way I had after I returned home after earning my Ph.D. in 2012: "Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water," as in this Golden Shovel poem I wrote (meaning that the Zen saying is laid out in the last word of each line): 

Living Zen

 

    I went and got my Ph.D. before

    I was seventy, and then with that intellectual enlightenment

    I came home again and found myself chopping

    Vegetables for dinner and hauling wood

    For the fire to warm the house and

    Wondered what difference it made, all that hauling

    Of books and stimulating the mind with ancient water.

 

    Then I got married, after

    I was seventy, and lived the enlightenment

    Of love until cancer came chopping

    Down my beloved liked a piece of wood

    For the funeral pyre and

    Left me hauling

    My emptiness around like a bucket of water.

    The emptiness comes to us from time to time, unshaping our days and forcing us to create ourselves anew. When it does, whether from retirement or a death or a pandemic that locks us in our houses, we have to create, again, the meaningfulness of our lives. Today I shape my life around the family that the coronavirus temporarily prevents me from visiting, the writing that has always been my mainstay, crafts that I enjoy, and, most of all, hiking day after day, by myself or with a friend, in these beautiful mountains I have called home for half a century.