So, day two.

Well I’ve already thought of a couple of problems with this escapade.

Morning pages are meant to be a process of disgorgement (if that’s a word); getting whatever’s in your head down on paper and thereby ‘out of your way’. However, knowing that what I am handwriting at this moment I will in a short while type and post naturally evokes a degree of self-consciousness. While I might normally rant and rage on the page, will I now restrain myself?

One is not meant to go back and look at what one wrote. Previously I wrote morning pages five or more times a week for a couple of years. I filed the pages away in an ever-expanding envelope and eventually threw the lot away without a second look. So, is what I write coherent, or at least readable? I reread yesterday’s post and, I think, it’s a little rambling and disjointed, but hey nobody told you to read it.

And while it takes me an hour to write these three pages (an hour! Hard to believe, eh?), it adds at least another half hour to type, minimally edit, proof and post.

This brings up for me my inclination to “counter-phobia” which is not an aversion to granite kitchen counter tops, rather it is a phobia about not being able to do something. You don’t think I can climb that mountain? I’ll show you! It might also be described as diving in head first without considering the consequences. Keep clam and carry on.

Perhaps another way of looking at this is my inherent lack of patience. I have read that the first half of life is about doing, the second half about being. Even just writing that brings up the enormity of that change. Spend the first forty odd years of life impatiently striving, doing, individuating and then learn to be patient, not to do so much, not to strive too hard.

Hidden in papers on my desk I rediscovered the following quote:

Patience means holding back your inclination to the seven emotions: hate, adoration, joy, anxiety, anger, grief, fear. If you don’t give way to the seven, you’re patient, then you’ll understand all manner of things and be in harmony with eternity.

Lord Toranga to Anjin-san

So how did impatient me end up here? That’s a longer story that I have time or space for here, but I’ll at least start.

I was born on July 23rd 1963 in Hemel Hempstead (“’emel”). Over the years it became clear to me that at that time I was one of the few inhabitants of Hemel Hempstead who had actually been born there. Although there had been settlements there since the twelfth century, it was only when it was designated as a “New Town” and built-out significantly in the post-war years that it became more than a blip on the map between the larger market towns of Aylesbury and Watford.

Now I realize that these things are on a continuum but I had by no means a happy childhood. From an early age, in fact from about eight years old, I did not feel safe in Hemel or, by extension, England. Unfortunately that lack of safety and security extended into my family. I developed, for very rational self-preserving reasons, an acute fight or flight mechanism, so that just about as soon as I was able I flew. My flight took me first to Germany and then, having miraculously met the love of my life, to the U.S.

The fight or flight reaction has had consequences needless to say. Today I am constricted. The image that comes to mind is of a boxer with fists up, shoulders rolled in, poised to do battle. The psychologically constricted poise I am in, and have been in for a long time, is the key obstacle to my finding satisfying work for the second half of my life.

Patience.

Its 9:30 am on Monday December 29th 2008. Christmas Day was on Wednesday this year so today is in the midst of those undefined days before the New Year begins with all its promise.

Except. Except. I have been unemployed now for almost three months. (Well actually unemployed in name only as I am not even eligible for unemployment benefits.) The gardening business my wife Debbie and I began in 2007 evaporated with the economic meltdown and since then the economy has deteriorated to a degree unseen since the 1930s. But I don't need to tell you that.

I read in today's paper that a journalist for NPR, Ketzel Levine, has been laid off. She was producing a series of stories about people who had been laid off and what they were going to do next when she was informed that she was to share their fate. To her credit her last story was on herself. The irony of her predicament was compounded for me when I read that she too lives in Portland, Oregon.

Today is a typical winter day in Portland. A uniformly grey sky with intense bursts of rain. Yesterday was the first day in two weeks that we were able to get our car out and make it to the store. Patches of snow from the worst storm of the last forty years still linger but are being rapidly washed away.

So if that's all the good news, here's rest of the bad. I'm forty-five, a balding white male who drinks and smokes more that is good for him. I had a reasonably successful career as a manager for a uniform company for more than a decade before at age 37, shortly before 9/11, resigning unable to conform any longer to the 'corporate environment'. In the intervening seven years I have acted, coached, consulted, gardened, taught, mentored, written, and ventured back, unsuccessfully, into the uniform business for a year before realizing that we were no longer a fit for one another. My wife and I are reasonably well educated, I have an MBA and she is a recovering Dentist, also unemployed, who feels the same sense of dread at re-entering dentistry that I do at the prospect of shaving, squeezing into a suit, tie, and dress shoes and reporting for duty at an office.

To say that I have no career prospects is a mis-characterization. It implies that I have some idea of what my career is meant to resemble and merely need to comb the help-wanted ads in search of the perfect opportunity. So, dear, reader, I have decided to write my way out of, or perhaps through, my current predicament.

I have recently re-started an exercise called "morning pages" from Julia Camerons' book "The Artist's Way - rediscovering your creative spirit." Morning pages are three pages to be written every morning come what may. Indeed 'come what may' is what it is all about. I am to write whatever comes into my head and put it down on paper. Even if all I can write is how stupid it feels to be writing this in an old spiral notebook using a light blue Bic pen then that is what is it. I have decided however to use this time and these three handwritten (the pages must be handwritten) pages to document the coming year and hopefully find some sense in my life.

At Christmas my Mother sent a replica of a WWII era poster issued by the British Government. On a bright red background reversed-out white capital letters admonish "Keep Calm and Carry On". Portland Oregon in 2008 is hardly London during the blitz but the advice seems as relevant today as it was then.