3 directions at once

If you let it; if you don't push hard to make your own way, the flow of life will take you in certain directions.  I tell this to my patients all the time.  You have the "will" and the ability to push back, and make things happen in other ways, but there is a general flow to things that will happen naturally, just because of age, place and other external circumstances, and they exert a constant pressure to make things happen.

(as an aside--- I can remember walking through the streets on NYC when I was an impressionable, philosophical thirteen year-old.  I looked up in the sky and saw the words "Time" and "Life" flashed up on the top of a huge silver building.  For an instant I thought, wow, this city really wants you to stop and think  about what is going on in your life.  But the next thing that flashed across the sky said "Sports Illustrated" and I realized that they only wanted me to buy something.  I have been aware of that since then.)

As I reach this stage of my life I find that I am letting things flow, and the current is pulling me in three directions.  The first, and newest, is that I am aware of how much time I spend thinking about my granddaughter, and how different it is from how I thought about my children.  As a new parent you have to watch the kid moment to moment: to feed it, change it, watch it sleep, breathe and to wander what it wants and needs right then.  That's what parents need to do.

As a grandparent I find that I keep wondering about my new off-spring longer-term.  I think about how she is now, tiny and cuddly, and how much that will change so quickly, and I find myself considering all the possibilities, good, bad, marvelous and indifferent. What will she encounter and what choices she will have to make?  What will be the world that she will deal with.  With my own kids it was certainly moment to moment: deal with feeding, deal with sleeping, deal with sounds, words, sitting, crawling, walking.  But now I wonder about things that this girl will encounter, probably long after I am around for her to tell me about them.

In the meantime my life is beginning to change in other ways.  I will soon reach an age when, despite Republican opposition, I will be able to receive checks from my government just for staying alive, whether I work, pay taxes, or just decide to watch "Housewives of New Jersey."  The money is nice, but it really isn't a deciding factor as much as it is a demarcation of time.  It is time to alter my schedule after thirty years of coming to the same city and sitting hour after hour,  looking people in the eye and asking them "what the fuck did you do that for? You nuts or something?"  I am being pushed, by my granddaughter and others in my family to use my time and energy to explore different things. 

In theory this is a good idea, in practice, it is very difficult for me to not take new patients, and to not feel guilty about that.  I am supposed look around and find new things to do, and there seem to be so many, but I have to learn to let myself do some of them.

I intend to do some of this over the next six months.  I am trying to challenge myself to do interesting, worthwhile things, while not stressing about it.  I hope that they are very different from the things I do now.  I really hope that they don't involve "helping people'" which is what so many of my friends who have worked other jobs all their lives are trying to do.  I feel I have done that for forty years.  I want to learn to waste time.  Not easy.

But still, after I type this, I am going to work.  I will see a row of patients who I want to see, each of which is struggling in their own way to get through this holiday season.  I seem to be of some help to all of them, as they keep coming -- and none of these people need letters send to anyone. One has lost his job and is having the first rough holiday ever.  Another is now estranged from her family for very good reasons, another has a very sick child and a husband who is freaking out because of it --- on and on it goes.  I am still very into that, at least once I get to the office.

The biggest change is now the contrast between working and not working.  It is a bigger transition from thinking about my family to getting my head back into work. The world is opening up.  The river has divided into three broad streams and each seems to be going through the rapids.  So far I have been able to steer clear of the rocks.