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November 5, 1998 |
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list making at the end of the 20th century under late capitalism | |||||
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Copyright © 1998, Janet I. Egan |
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Before I went to bed last night, I actually made a list of things to do today. That's one of the things I stopped doing when I left Cosmodemonic Telecomm for the life of washing litterboxes, guarding plover nests, and driving nieces (and lived to tell about it). At the time I also stopped wearing a watch but that lasted about a week - I couldn't stand not knowing what time it was, not to mention I got a lot of parking tickets. I have, however, been able to stick to not using a Daytimer or other "time management system" for the duration of this experiment. The only problem with that is I sometimes forget to perform small tasks - they just slip my mind -and they become urgent and so on and on. So I made a list. List making at the end of the 20th century ought to be different from list making earlier in the century but in fact it wasn't. I scribbled the list on my calendar with a fountain pen. OK so the fountain pen was one of those disposable ones, but still it's not very high-tech. Did I do the things on the list? No,but at least they are written down so I can procrastinate on them. I slept late, hung out at Starbucks, talked and listened in good conversation mainly about spirituality, did errands, read more of Song for the Blue Ocean, re-read The Diamond that Cuts Through Illusion - Thich Nhat Hanh's commentaries on the diamond sutra - and went to my meeting. Mainly I thought a lot about emptiness. Emptiness in the Buddhist sense, not in the lonely pathetic spinster sense. I really don't make a very good lonely pathetic spinster anyway. Nor do I make a very good Buddhist I suppose. Joan-west is always accusing me of not doing very much in the way of dharma activities, largely because of my resistance to some of the more esoteric Tibetan teachings. Partly what I think she is picking up on though is that I sort of go about living the dharma the same way I was trained to live Catholicism - not make a big deal about it and not make it a separate activity. I'm not just a Buddhist when I have a dharma text in my hand or when I'm sitting meditation. I'm not just a Buddhist on Tuesday evenings at 8:00 or whatever anymore than I was Catholic only on Sunday mornings at 9:00. Every spiritual teaching I have received somehow informs the way I live my life. For me that is what spirituality is about : everyday life. Amidst pondering the imponderable, I tried to catch up on writing this journal and reading other journals as well as my daily monitoring of the Providence Journal for news about the Providence Harbor dredging project. I got really excited today when I read that Buddy Cianci 's against dumping the dredged material at both Site 150 (my hot button) and Site 3. In fact he mentioned Site 150 first! I was so happy I called Nancy's voice mail and left a message saying I was going to put off writing Site 150: Elegy for Watchemocket Cove indefinitely because if the mayor of Providence is against these sites there's some chance the Corps will actually find another site. Oh, and I got a thank you note for my Watchemocket Cove observation data from ASRI so I know my observations are being put to good use. | |||||
