Speedrunning Life

Dearest Rachel –

It was a weird realization to catch myself in last night. I’d just gotten the bank statements for the church and camp for last month, so I was thinking about how I could get everything reconciled and the statements prepared some time today. That way, the board members could have the data they need for their monthly meeting… which will be two weeks from tonight. As I calculated in my head as to when exactly that was, I realized that it would be my first full day back from the trip we’re going on to Israel – at which point, it crossed my mind that I was mentally skipping right over that trip to deal with a deadline that technically wouldn’t come up until after we returned.

It has ever been thus with me; for whatever reason, I’ve always been in a hurry to move on from wherever I was in the present. Unlike you, who wanted to stay a kid for the rest of your life (and to a large extent, you probably succeeded – although where you deemed it necessary to be the grownup, you could certainly manage it), on a macro level, I always wanted to be, more on a level with the adults I related to better than I did with my peers. On a more day-to-day basis, I tend to view each day as a series of tasks that each need to be accomplished in order to move on to the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and so on ad infinitum.

Even today, my life is a little more than a series of tasks to finish so as to get on with the next one. First, there’s the matter of getting my workout over and done with, and then the usual morning routine of washing up and getting dressed, followed by a few hours at the ‘office.’ Now while today I actually have work there that I don’t need to put into quotes when I refer to it, as I often do; all the same, it’s something that I want to get out of my way (much like, I apologize for saying this, this letter to you) so as to move on to yet another task: that of getting some shopping done for the house before we depart next Monday.

All of this is nothing that comes as any surprise to you, after all. You may have seen this tendency back when we were in college, but I know you had to deal with it in our marriage literally from day one; you’ll recall that I’d brought guidebooks with us on our honeymoon to DisneyWorld (back when it was still worth going to, but also ridiculously crowded; another reason we set our wedding back to September as opposed to June, allowing us to avoid the rush of summer travel). Every morning, we went over our ‘battle plans’ for the park we intended to visit that day, in order to get the maximum enjoyment with a minimal amount of the usual annoyances like long lines and the like. You didn’t object, because I probably had you at “maximum enjoyment,” but I wonder if, as we rushed about the parks, whether you actually agreed that we in fact were getting the maximum amount of enjoyment as we tried to stick to the schedule and route we’d agreed upon.

Of course, after three or four days of alternating between ninety degrees outside in the heat and humidity and sixty degrees inside with the air conditioning on full blast, we both caught bad colds, and were forced to slow down to a virtual stop. Then again, honeymoons are meant to be spent in bed together, aren’t they? For whatever reason, we’d kind of set that aside during the days up until then (and we had yet to figure out that nights were somewhat iffy between the two of us. The bottom line, we hadn’t determined how well Saturday mornings worked out for that sort of activity. Granted, we hadn’t had a Saturday morning together as man and wife at that point, so how would we be expected to know?).

But so many of the rest of our days caught me trying to get one activity over with, so as to take on the next thing and so forth. It’s a reasonable approach when you have actual tasks to accomplish, such as with an actual job, or if one needs to be somewhere at a specific time. But when one doesn’t have those sort of time constraints, there shouldn’t be any need for that; one could take things slower, and look around, savoring the present. And I don’t think I’ve ever quite learned how to do that – although there are times like this when I’m at least sufficiently self-aware to know what I’m doing.

Setting aside the occasional need to actually finish a task or get somewhere on time, I wonder if it isn’t a temporal version of the old proverb about the greener grass:

 In the morning you will say, “·I wish [O that] it were evening,” and in the evening you will say, “·I wish [O that] it were morning.”

Deuteronomy 28:67a, Expanded Bible

I wonder if this pell-mell rush from one thing to the next isn’t a case of constantly thinking that, when the dust settles, things will be better. The trouble is, the dust never settles, and as I jump from one thing to the next, I’m not even so much as letting it settle in the first place, so how can I expect things to get better if I’m the very reason the conditions don’t exist where they can? I’m so busy speedrunning life – even though, for the most part, I don’t have to anymore – that I forget to actual play and enjoy the game.

Then again, honey, you’d probably point out that I was never much for games, either – always trying to win them (and both getting upset when I couldn’t, and embarrassed when I did, because I knew what losing felt like) and get on with the next thing. Maybe, while you’re keeping an eye on me, you could grab my reigns and pull back on them to force me to slow down now and then. Either way, I hope you could wish me luck, too, as I’m going to be needing it, in any event.