An Examined Life

Whew! I disappeared down the rabbit hole for a while. A few weeks ago, I decided to organize my study. This is a normal winter activity for me. All summer long, while I live outdoors, sailing, beach, hikes, family visiting, trips to the Cape. In the meantime, I just let stuff pile up in my study. My desk becomes a mountain range that rivals the Appalachian chain with crests of letters, photos, financial forms, articles I clipped, books, things "I'm definitely going to read," notes to myself on poems, story ideas, and just bits and pieces of everyday life. It gets to a point where I cannot see the wood of my desk. I put my coffee cup on stacks of paper. Even my mouse pad begins to end up on a pile of stuff.

Then there are the foothills of piles on the floor: Sailing magazines, books that "are definitely next," more folders, my daughter's doodles and scholastic stuff. And there is some bedrock too: A few stacks of books and folders that never found their own home on a shelf or in a file cabinet when I moved into this house seven years ago.

So, this winter I thought I would do more than the normal winter "clean the desk" mission. This was going to be the final assault. Mission Study Storm. Push all the way through to Baghdad. (Are we allowed to joke about this?)

Well, it is not a mission I recommend without prescription-strength drugs. I had no inkling of how psychologically tough this would be. A contributing factor to the depression which developed into a category 4 hurricane was being single. So, there are my warnings to others who might want to attempt this in their own homes.

The way to tackle a project like this conjures up the old joke. Question: How do you eat an elephant. Answer: One bite at a time. So, I picked up the first piece of paper. I needed to look at it and then decide what to do with it: file it? (I am an archivist who files almost all of the mail I get and send) or is it garbage? Okay, next piece of paper. A photo. Keep or chuck?

In this kind of mission, it is not acceptable to create another pile of "I'll deal with this later." Because that pile then just becomes another ridge of bedrock in my study. It's just bulldozing it from one place to another. This time, I was determined to take as many days as I needed to finally clear this land. So, the photo had to find a place in an album, or get scanned and put into a computer folder that was dated and labeled.

I noticed I was suddenly in a mine field, when I found myself in my open file cabinet. I guess I had ended up there because I was going to file something and came across a file of yellowing college papers. "Chinese literature?" Did I really still need that? That file got chucked. But now it was too late: I couldn't just walk a straight line back out of this file cabinet. I had to finish clearing this particular corner of my study before I could get out of the file cabinet.

Now you can see how labyrinthine this project became.

But so far, we are just talking about grunt work. Trudging through the fields of history. So far, we are just talking about (to borrow from Tim O'Brien's short story) "the things that I carried" for so long and needed to be filed. So far, we not talking about taking fire.

The first slugs, you absorb pretty easily. A file with my divorce papers. Then a file with some legal papers from a previous relationship. Then the mortar rounds begin to surround you: Letters from this past love; a poem written for a relationship that burned both me and her. An envelope with a CD and cassette tape of an affair that didn't have enough air to breath, but couldn't die either.

Remember that this is page by page, item by item, so by this time, I am three days into this war. By this time, I have already shredded a couple reams of past personal records that no longer have any significance to me or the IRS. I have created heaps, (perhaps ten reams) of paper that is lifeless to me and needs to be buried en masse in a dumpster or recycling.

But it gets to a point where I just couldn't bring myself to look at one more piece of my history. Do I slash and burn? I was tempted.

Suddenly all time became distorted. I lost emotional perspective and all relevance lost its focus. If this were a battle scene in a movie, this would be the time, when the sound goes silent. You see the explosions, you see the open, shouting mouths of others, you see the grand destruction, but it is silent and I rise and walk calmly among the cacophony of my study, -- which before this began was just heaps of stuff in piles, but now is a distributed carpet of history spread out beyond my study: onto kitchen counters, dining room table, living room coffee table, couches -- I walk among it and finger the lighter as perhaps a soldier might suddenly think about this gun as a friendly nurse who, in a calm voice, is offering a simple solution to all this.

We all grow up with a simple vision. A career. A home somewhere. A marriage. Perhaps a family. But generally, one picture. One journey. Something that has continuity and cohesiveness.

I began to understand early on in my life, that my life was more varied. My parents' divorce split my world in two. Then moving to Germany when I was ten split it again. Moving back to the states split me from family and friends again. That first early love split my heart in two. But even with all that, I could accept that my life as a whole, was whole. It was still one journey. And even after my first seven-year relationship ended, I had a sense of direction in my life. Then came a marriage, a child, a divorce, the ending of one career, and the dissolution of the next. Another five year struggle to find peace within a relationship conceded to failure.

And here I was: Going through each of these pieces of my life.

Suddenly my life did not feel like a grand picture -- a continuous heroic, Joseph Campbell struggle.

It felt like all I had were these puzzle pieces. Pieces that never really fit together. To throw away any one of them is to deny that all of them have their equal place in my past. How to decide which ones to keep and which ones to let go of?

In the middle of it all, the posse came to my rescue. Joel sensed the desperation in my voice and told me to leave the battle scene and spend a few days with him in Boston. I did and it was needed rest. When I came back, I had strength again. I went back at it with cold-blooded determination.

I am pleased to report that I am 90 percent done now. I have taken a break for the last week. All my past is filed away for who-knows-what; posterity? The things that are left are writings that I have left in half-completed stages. Poems, short stories, novels, freelance articles. Do I put the stack on my desk and work through them methodically? Ha! Just kidding. You know that's not me. But if I file them away, they will never have the hope of completion.

So, the process begins again. There is a pile on my desk of folders with beginnings in them. But now, when I walk into my study, I feel like I can breathe again. It is a joy to come in here and feel "clean."

I don't have any grand insight into any of this. The depression of being amidst blown apart pieces of my past has passed. But I don't have any profound lesson from that process. In fact, if anything, it has made me aware -- more painfully than I had ever realized before -- that I am a bit of a Frankenstein. My life is stitched together.