Year One Done

I have reviewed my first full year of retirement. It was a year of living leisuredly, of domestic maintenance and improvement, reading, writing, thinking, guitaring, some travel, socializing and familiarizing, and spectating upon the universe. Watching the world go by, passing the time, not in either a trivial recreational way nor a determined scientific way, but moderately, suggestively, impressionistically. At times I hear the call, faint though it may be, of a greater ambition, of doing something, and I genuinely wonder if the something that I think I’m doing is actually something, anything at all—that is, you know, this: reading, thinking, and scratching out in electrons some evidence of consciousness, gratitude, and charity. It’s all been said and done before, all that matters anyway, but one has to say and do as much of that all as one can oneself, live it, enact it, if only imaginatively. Perhaps that’s how the objective universe holds together, in a weave of consciousnesses. Yours, mine, theirs, living and dead. It’s how my subjective universe does.

When I feel that nervous edginess to do something bigger, to be someone more than myself, to inflict some good upon someone else, upon the world, I lie down on the couch, to nap, and it often goes away. Or I smoke on it. And maybe get around to it.