Eight

For the first time in weeks, I slept long past eight o’clock. My body must have called off the early rise as the week's exercise caught up to me.

I’ve been flitting through books as snow threatens to fall. My coaching license course is disjointed in its expectations, but I’ve found use in its new material. The first meeting made me realize I have to reengage with learning. Too long have I been able to coast by without overt mental effort. It’s nice to reclaim some scholastic energies.

Half the time I write, I find myself wandering through lyric lines. There hasn’t been much impetus for stories lately, even if I have been combing through my archives to release the anthologies.

The other day, I was driving out to Troutdale to see one of my closest friends who had driven in from Montana to look at Portland area homes with his wife when I started laughing at the absurdity of it all. I’ve been haggard from the breakneck pace I’ve put myself on since I returned to the States. Since my first week back, I’ve been coaching soccer and doing anything and everything that’s come across my path to combat the relative inactivity I had during my island stay (although that idea itself is ridiculous when you consider I was doing new things daily in a foreign country) but rural vs. city provides two very different lifestyles.

It’s the beginning of February, and I’m helping coach four different age groups and occasionally attending gym sessions for the high school team. Saturday through Thursday, I have guaranteed soccer involvement, whether it be practice, games, or weight room sessions. The only day off I genuinely have is Friday, but that’s when I might end up on the mountain to snowboard or go to a local show. That being said, I laughed on that drive out to Troutdale because I was doing exactly what I said I’d be doing when I was in Japan. I told my friends and coworkers over there that I would move back and start coaching. Even the coaching license course is part of what I told them.

It’s only been about six months since getting back, and I’ve bedded in like a duck to water, but I can’t shake the feeling of “not enough” even though I know it’s absurd. If any of my friends were to tell me the same scenario, I’d be hyped for them. Especially adding in the artistic achievements.

The pace can trip us up. We’re constantly told (socially and perhaps personally) that we have to achieve more. Year over year, day over day, our output has to become exponentially greater. It's no surprise that unhappiness and stress levels are rocketing. The calm moments necessary for rest and re-energizing have been monopolized and rationed out.

Slowing things down allows the flavor to return to life. If everything is done at breakneck speed, the world is a blur as you move past. I think of sitting at a wooden kitchen table drinking coffee with clover honey as I read a book and imagined a future outside of Southern Oregon. I think of slow walks through the east side of Portland as the summer light faded, but dreams of expansive stories did not.

There’s no grand coherent message to this— just thoughts scattered like leaves and the occasional breath of insight as if knowledge took a sentient form to perch behind the ears of the occasionally receptive.