Musings of Navigating The Finite remainder of life from Porchville, with the hope of a glimpse of The Infinite

Sunday, July 11, 2010

The Finiteness Of My Vacation

Crap! Tomorrow is back to work. I had a week off. Nine lovely days of not setting the alarm. When I left work on July 2nd, the time off seemed infinite--like a kid on the last day of school in June. By the end of the day on July 5th a shudder of reality had hit me--my vacation is finite, only 4 days left, plus the weekend.

Today I heard the wheezing of a cicada up in my walnut tree--a bit early. How appropriate, as a kid I hated that sound. September is coming! To this day, I still hate the sight of goldenrod (thinking of those stupid ruled tablets that created so much anguish) and the ads in the Sunday paper featuring an apple and a junky little black board with a chalked alphabet and always one letter written backwards...screaming BACK TO SCHOOL.

And so it is today, tomorrow is back to work. How damned, so damned finite! Indeed, how finite is this life through which I am forced to navigate.

3 comments:

  1. So your vacation time is about over. Bummer. Your preference for vacation time over work time seems healthy. Workaholics are mystifying, perhaps dangerous. Has your work no redeeming features, or is it tolerable only when you've grown accustomed to the place? The hours of a workday are, or should be, a finite number, ergo navigable. If you bring along your binoculars and use them to look for guiding lights on the ceiling, maybe they'll send you home early.

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  2. Work is tolerable and does have redeeming features. However I am at the awkward age 61, a retiree in spirit, but, well certain economic conditions prevail.

    Time has a quality to it. Always finite yet flexible. Think of how 15 minutes passes in the following situations:

    You are late for an important appointment.

    You are waiting for a bus on a cold snowy day.

    You are getting a tooth drilled.

    You are having a lovely dinner with a close group of friends.

    Physics would say that it is all the same period of time, but do we experience the world as a set of equations? Our experience differs radically from one situation to the next. Some submit that it is purely psychological, but I have a theory that you could live forever in the dentist chair...well perhaps it is like relativity in reverse, the rest of the world thought you were gone for an hour, but you felt it was 50,000 years.

    So it is with work. The clocks seem to have a transmission in them, 7:30 to 4:00 seems to run a lot slower than the clocks at home.

    BTW, I was given a one day reprieve. I picked up some intestinal bug. Not a pleasant day, but still oddly better than work.

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  3. Time is sooo finite. Hope you feel better enough to write another blog.

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