After many months of this insufferable coronacrappiness pandemic I am starting to put my project ducks back into a somewhat orderly row.
Before all of this happened I was carrying on with my SOLO paintings while having my bathroom and studio redone.
There were contractors coming in and out, clouds of dust, mounds of rubble… and too many trips to the hardware store getting in the way of work but, at full speed, the renovation would soon be over, so it didn’t mattered much. The sooner all of it got done, the sooner I could get back to work full time in a beautiful new studio complete with an adjacent bathroom.
Then, overnight, we got locked in and the contractors got locked out.
This put a stop on the frantic disruptive renovation activities (peace at last) but left me with a badly done, unfinished bathroom, the inevitable chaos of piled up unused material, and a dilemma:
Should I carry on working and wait until things reopen? Should I clean up as best as I can and try to live a normal life in a half-home, half-ruin? Should I try to finish renovations myself?
Doubt brought my already hampered productivity to a halt.
Forget procrastination… procrastination is scratching your ass surfing the web for half an hour before guilt overrides laziness.
Doubt is the mental impossibility of carrying out ANY activity whatsoever due to the lack of clarity as to the intrinsic value of that which you are doing in the great scheme of things.
Doubt prevented me from “wasting” time trying to finish the renovation because “what if” the economy reopens soon? I wouldn’t be able to make a dent in it in what… two weeks? A month? Besides, I’d first have to learn how to do indoor plumbing. What if I put time into that and the minute I figure out how to install a drain, the world is full of happy healthy vaccinated contractors again?
On the other side of that coin, doubt made me overly conscious of the time I was putting into my work. Every brushstroke I applied to the painting lying on the dinner-table-temporarily-turned-into-a-work-table reminded me that there was half a home in need of order.
Again, it felt like I was “wasting” precious time when so much needed to be done, wasn’t being done, couldn’t get done. Along came doubt: maybe it would get to be done soon… maybe the best thing I could do was to continue working… in spite of the mess, in spite of the rubble, in spite of uncertainty. Life may get back to normal. Maybe even soon.
And then it didn’t. And again it didn’t. And it didn’t yet again.
Next time a virus makes the evolutionary jump to the best host in the Universe and we collectively decide to panic and cower in our homes… at least we could write off the whole year in advance, instead of getting our hopes up and crushed every two weeks.
“Dear citizen, we have a pandemic. Go home. Now stay. … No. Stay! … Yes. Staaaaaay. … Good boy! See you next year.”
These last months were the worst game of “are we there yet” I ever played. And we are still not there yet.
This reminds me of those awful summer vacations where Johnny gets tricked into visiting some random aunt he never met.
His parents tell him he is going to love that bitch the beach and suddenly he is stuck in a hot car for what seems to be an eternity only to get spewed out of the backseat smelling like the clam chowder he is about to have for dinner.
The next morning Johnny gets up full of hope that he will experience that awesome beach his parents used to lure him into the moving chowder pot. He runs into the kitchen in his socks and jammies where he finds mom, dad and aunt Dahlia looking gloomily out the window. “It’s raining”, his mom announces. Aunt Dahlia tries to make it better: “But we have all kinds of ways to have fun inside, right?” Dad rolls his eyes and Johnny knows he is screwed being duped.
This event is followed by an indefinite number of days spent on house arrest, playing aptly named bored board games with his cousins who are so sick of him they wish Johnny was never born. Little Molly, who is four, says as much right to his face. The feeling is mutual. The bonding goes on until the day comes when it is time to climb into the moving pot again. That is, of course, the day the sun comes out to provide Johnny’s family a nice steam on the ride home.
Like poor Johnny we are going from trapped to stuck to trapped again and there is nothing we can do.
That… is precisely the point.
Doubt is the feeling that arises when we are in a situation where fighting it is dumb, resisting it is futile and there is nothing much better awaiting us once everything gets back to normal.
For me it will be rubble and mess. For Johnny it will be getting trapped in school. Dad will be stuck at work while mom is stuck in traffic, and aunt Dahlia will go back to sweeping sand out of her carpet once the kids start playing on the beach again.
Life is… normal. In spite of it being insane. So is getting stressed out over how insane everything is right now. Life is never not stressful. It is never not crazy.
After I realized this, I decided to stop freaking out, take a nap step back and reorganize my ducks in a way they can better be dealt with, even if they continue to be stuck swimming in clam chowder.
