Day: March 10, 2009

I’ve been reading Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. It is a beautiful book. Ms. Gilbert has a way of spinning words so that I feel I am there with her in Italy, or India, or Bali. When I close the book and my eyes refocus on my surroundings I am a little disappointed. There are no tropical flowers here, nor many singing birds. This is Utah in early March. All I have is tufts of green poking out of the ground, a mere promise of flowers to come. And then I get in my car and drive down paved roads on any one of a dozen mundane errands. It is all so prosaic and unlovely. Nothing like walking in India or riding a bicycle down Balinese roads. But then I stop and think again. Eat Pray Love is not meant to inspire dissatisfaction, quite the opposite. It is about finding peace and joy and beauty. Ms. Gilbert had the glorious opportunity to live for a year in foreign places. I am not likely to have that opportunity in my life. I am likely to spend most of my life in automobile-centered America. This does not mean that my life lacks beauty or poetry. To many people the world over American life is very attractive. I think happiness lies in finding the beauty that is around me all the time. Ms. Gilbert found women splitting rocks in India to be beautiful. I can find beauty in the amazing dance of pedals, levers, and wheels to operate an automobile. I can look at the concrete expanse of the cul de sac and consider it a wasteland, or I can remember the endless games that my children have played with the other neighborhood kids across that gloriously smooth expanse. I can lament my lack of flowers, or I can watch the spring bulbs grow and find beauty in the cycle of dormancy and renewal. I just need to look around me and see my life with eyes that are looking for beauty, rather than eyes who seek source for complaint.

There are many advantages to being married to your business partner. I love the way that we weave family needs around the business needs. I love having brief business meetings as our paths cross in the kitchen. I love working with someone who loves my kids just as much as I do and who will actively encourage me to place their needs first. However it is not all sunshine and roses. Sometimes the business needs and the family needs compete in ways that leave me arguing, not with Howard, but with myself.

An example: The part of me that monitors family interactions and needs says that we need to take more vacations together as a family. We need to forcibly remove Howard and I from our offices so that we will just let it all go for a day or two. It would be good for us. However the business manager part of my brain knows that even minor events can cause a major disruption to our schedule. The schedule is what allows us to get so much done in a given day. It is the business manager’s job to defend the schedule so that the cartoonist can get stuff done. And so I argue with myself. Usually we end up downsizing the family events. Rather than a big weekend away, we plan little activities that fit into the open spaces of the schedule. In the long run these smaller activities are more reinforcing to the family structure than a single big trip, but they are not equivalent. Ideally the family would get to do both.

This past couple of weeks the schedule has been all skewampus with final book edits and family events. The rest of the month, and indeed the next couple of months, are clear of large events. This thought soothes the business manager enough that she is willing to contemplate a family weekend sometime in June. I should probably make reservations now while she’s feeling complaisant.