Dear Diary: Fail
For eight months, I’ve been engaged in a personal project so intimate that I didn’t know how to describe it. Until this past weekend, when I saw, startlingly, that I’ve been taking the elements of my everyday life apart and putting them back in the way that I want them arranged right now. The schedules, the possessions — the materiality of time and volume. Everything has been up for review. And everything is too boring to mention.
One unexpected boon connected with this project is that it doesn’t prompt me to ask: What took so long! This is not a project that I could have undertaken any earlier. Because in the old days, in my life until eight months ago, I was still growing, still open to options. Now I’m more like a retired person, eager to give the heave-ho to items and routines that are still essentially speculative: one of these days, I’ll get round to this. Maybe so, but I’m not going to make any room for such possibilities. While trying to throw away as little as possible, I’m focused on what I’m actually doing right now, not on what might take my fancy six months hence.
And I feel the very opposite of retired: I’m finally, at long last, engaged. Completely hooked up. I know that this entry would be vastly more cogent if only I would spell out a few examples of the changes in my thinking about everyday life, and, especially, a few examples of objects and outlooks that I have jettisoned. But the building blocks that I’m talking about here are incredibly dull. To make things exciting, I ought to confess that I am never going to read all of Proust in French. But that happens to be a confession that I can’t yet make — I’m still holding out hope for that. All the shifting and relocation has involved bricks both smaller and less intrinsically interesting. At least to talk about.
Is this entry a fail?