I have been thinking of late about the particularity of life. It is the profound sense of revelation which comes when we become fully aware of the obvious. We each lead a particular life -- always just this life, and not that life. We meander through life until we reach a nexus, a point where the path ahead diverges, and we become conscious of a choice. We can, of course, choose to sit still, refuse to travel on, and there is a certain attractiveness to just sitting, but ultimately movement is life, and most of us choose the movement of life, the travel and travail. So the choice is before us, left or right, and we know that to choose one is to let go of the other, and we know as well that letting go of the path not chosen can be difficult.
All of this is a very abstract way of saying that I have decided to retire. Political shenanigans (the perfect word in this particular case -- shenanigans) brought me to a fork in the path. I could stay in my post as the provost at Salt Lake Community College, and there was some pressure to do so, but there are certain things up with which I cannot put. There is a difference between practicing humility, and enduring humiliation, and to stay would have meant enduring humiliation, a particular form of duhka, or an intentional suffering, a fully conscious acceptance of dookey as one's lot. There's little sense in that, particularly when one has other options. I chose instead to retire, but that means letting go of the ambition to become a college president as well as an income that allowed us to live carelessly with money. The choice was not as difficult as I might, on occasion, make it out to be. Although I do believe I would have been a good president, I would have been a different kind of president, and the club of presidentia is all about diversity just so long as the diversity centers on differences that make no real difference. I did want to be president, but I didn't want to join the club, and I'm sure the membership intuited my various rejections of them and in turn rejected me.
I am only a month down the new path, but already the old path seems distant enough to be, well, irrelevant to my current concerns. I am building a shed. At least I'm calling it a shed. It's more an outbuilding, a full 8 x 16 foot outbuilding. There is a purpose behind the shed. We have purchased a home in Mountain Home, our own private piece of Idaho. It's small, but really perfect for Lora and me, with a room for Lora's crafts and a full size garage for my endeavors, but there is little in the way of storage for Christmas decorations, for the bikes, for the lawn mower, shovels, rakes and various yard tools, for the paraphernalia of life. The shed allows the garage to be free of storage and free for my shop. Not immediately, but perhaps by next spring, it will also be, at one end, a green house. A place to start seedlings. We plan on displacing most of the lawn with raised vegetable beds. I will save the technical description for later, when I have a camera to assist me, but in the meantime
Peace and Potatoes for All
As an aside, I really don't imagine a broad readership for this blog. I am thinking of it more as a journal as Thoreau must have thought of his journal, but then, too, not exactly an exercise in "journaling." It strikes me that "journaling" is too much self-involvement for the sake of self-involvement. The "blog" allows me to maintain the illusion that I'm speaking to someone other than myself. Also, now that I am no longer publicly employed, or won't be by August 31st, I no long feel constrained in what I do or do not say publicly. I no longer need concern myself with how my differences appear to the club of presidentia, or the faculty of my college, or my fellow academic administrators, or anyone else for that matter.
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