A light rain yesterday
as I drove home from work, a wetness during the night, the streets are still damp this morning; there are beads of moisture on the windows still; the sky is grey; the day, such as it is, is underway.
I am set to retire as the end of August of this year - I will no longer be making this workday morning drive to Ripon. What will this change mean for this journal? What will I capture if I am not forced to go anywhere, do something other than sit at my writing desk at home? What will come of this habit of creating a kind of repository? A fellow never really knows what he will do. I think I shall try to continue - to keep setting aside a time and place to make this side-wise kind of record. It's not a log of doings, so much as a log of "seeings," real and imagined.
I keep two kinds of journals - a daily events log that won't mean much, I suppose, to anyone but myself and some future foolish biographer (Tom laughs); and this log of observations and ideas. This one holds superior interest in the long run. I also keep a tally of random notes - not really a journal, but phrases, ideas, and observations that I set down as they occur to me, material that I sometimes eventually find useful in other contexts. None of my experience with keeping journals really prepares me to teach anything about journals beyond what I've learned here. Though I would like to teach. But I have nothing to say, no ideas but in the things of my experience. If I find opportunity to teach, that's the place I'll have to teach from.
I step outside to leave for work, some patch of blue sky. Far off to the south, storm clouds. A lighter cloud cover in other directions. It's a chill morning, even in the greenness with some sun.
There is still no flag at the cemetery. Nothing flapping to indicate the direction of the wind.
Out in the country I see storm clouds off to the west, too. And far to the east, over Lake Michigan.
Do we invest ourselves in each day, or simply swim through it as through water, there but not committed to it? What is this investment, this grabbing hold?
A flag just south of Ripon says the wind is hard from the west.
I guess the investment in the day is every day choosing to live as if it's the last day. That kind of meaning in the acceptance of what is. Can a fellow do that? He can hope so, he can strive his damned-est to do it.
Comments