Stay of Execution

Reverse Beachcombing

This morning, finally, Housemate and I brought our bowl of pretty shells and rocks to a nearby island.  It's right near our house, connected to the mainland by a causeway.  It has several beaches -- one sandy, most rocky -- and a running path around the perimeter.  We took the dogs down to the beach and tossed the shells and rocks we had collected into the water, or up on the border of the crabgrass, for someone else to find. 

It's going to mix some beachcombers up.  We sprinkled dozens of sand dollars around.  I've never seen a sand dollar on this island.  These ones came from Popham beach one magical winter afternoon.  Three big moonshells.  I remember finding about five moonshells, the size of my fist, on Crescent Beach way back when.  (I kept two.)  And then there were the pebbles from Orcas Island in Puget Sound, from a road trip I took with Housemate back in 1998, back when she lived in California.  We laughed as we tossed those to the left and the right.   A friend's rock collection, with mineral specimens, got added to the natural rocks on the beach.  We imagined some amateur geologist marvelling at finding Sillimanite on Mackworth Island.  The big heart-shaped granite stone I found at Kettle Cove.  Goodbye.  Ooh, said Housemate, showing me a nice brown-and-grey stripey rock.  This one came from Iceland -- my ex-boyfriend gave it to me.  Tossed aside.  I said goodbye to five or six magical translucent white stones, rounded and soft, almost glowing, that I loaded into my pockets one visit to Crescent Beach.  We got a little clingy as we came to the bottom of the bowl.  "Maybe we should just keep this shell -- see how pretty it is?" Housemate asked.  I shook my head.  I showed her a small stone that I think looks like a lion's head.  She was unmoved.  We emptied the whole bowl. 

On our way back along the beach, as we went to return the bowl to the truck and start our run, my eyes were scanning the sand below me.  It's a habit.  Three times I almost bent down to pick up something we had sprinkled there.  Wow!  A sand dollar! 

More Clutter

My life is accelerating right now, with the fledgling LexThink project to map out, a fledgling law practice to build, a fledgling long distance relationship (ack!), and the summer sailing season blazing toward me like a freight train and a whole set of regattas to organize and volunteers to cajole now that I'm the race officer.  Not to mention my own boat to prepare. 

So after months of wonderful spacious unstructured time I find that I'm suddenly stressed and distracted.  I missed an appointment last week.  I lost a key.  I'm frustrated by clutter, and it's everywhere.  I can't immediately tell what I need to deal with right now and what I can postpone.  My inbox is overwhelming -- and I now have four active email accounts.  That's ridiculous.  I'm looking ahead at this week's itinerary and can't figure out how I'm going to do all the things I'd like to do.  I need a system. 

I think I'll reread David Allen's book, Getting Things Done.  I'm going to download ActiveWords again, which I left on my old firm's computer and have missed.  I'm going to do a massive purge of my clutterbox, which is where I stow mail and papers I'm not yet ready to process.  Probably have to do that with my electronic inboxes, too.  Jack Vinson has a nice post about his personal management system. 

A Grab Bag of Unrelated Topics

1) A friend loaned me Ashley MacIsaac's Hi how are you today? CD, and it surprised and delighted me.  I thought I knew what it would sound like because I'd gone to see Ashley MacIsaac play.  But in concert he was unaccompanied, so I wasn't prepared for the album's fusion of techno and rock with that spectacular Cape Breton fiddle mastery.  It's like nothing I've heard.  I turned it up loud, really loud, and was glad for a long moonlit drive to a party on Saturday night. 

2) Yesterday I went to an educational seminar.  Big room, lots of people.  A lot of talk about Rule 11.  But it wasn't lawyers, it was sailors.  Rule 11 says "When boats are on the same tack and overlapped, a windward boat shall keep clear of a leeward boat."  Sounds simple, but there's a lot more nuance than you might think.  We also discussed Rule 18 a whole lot, and of course rules 15, 16, 17.  We discussed a whole bunch of the Racing Rules of Sailing, which are updated every four years and just changed in January.  Dave Perry led the seminar.  He's great.  He's a fellow graduate of the Yale Sailing Team, and a sailing legend.  He helped out the team from time to time when I was there, and I've always been an admirer of his.  What's great about him is that he's not only a great sailor but a great sportsman -- warm, encouraging, friendly, helpful, respectful, self-effacing, and easygoing.  He's a leader in the sport, not just on the racecourse but as an organizer and a volunteer.  I highly recommend Winning in One Designs (need to re-read it myself) and Understanding the Racing Rules of Sailing. 

3) I learned about this event yesterday.  Since I'm busy appreciating my hip flexors today, it would be premature to say that I'm already scheming about finding a partner with a canoe, and borrowing some snowshoes, and thinking about a good costume to wear.  But tomorrow I might start such scheming, if my hip flexors permit it.

4) I have decided that today is the last day of the Get-Rid-Of-Disfavored-Tea-By-Drinking-It project.   We have done great work.  Gone is the dreaded Forest Equinox, the Orange Spice, the Decaf English Breakfast.  Gone is the peach-infused Green Tea.  Gone is the French Vanilla flavored black tea.  The Brassica decaf black tea, the Chinese Restaurant Tea.  The damn Tazo passion herbal tea is still around, alas.  There's still plentiful jasmine tea, gunpowder green tea, and lapsang souchang, but in fairness all that stuff is pretty good.   There will be a tea party tonight or tomorrow, where we throw our unwanted tea into the harbor in a display of independence.  And from that day forward we will buy only such tea as we actually wish to drink.   I will gently decline gifts of tea from well-meaning friends and family. 

Contest: Tell Me Something I Don't Know

I continue to be amazed by how interesting and smart my blog readers are.  Who knew golfers ring bells?  Not me. 

So here's the game: please leave a comment telling me something I don't know.  Preferably something interesting, although my standards for what is interesting are very low.  The two that catch my eye the most will win a nifty and sentimental prize -- something unearthed in the Good Riddance Project that was just too good to throw away. 

Good Riddance: A Letter to Myself

The summer after my 2L year, my BIGLAW firm took its summer associates on an Outward Bound daytrip.  We did team building exercises with a few partners and associates at the firm who snuck away with us.  At the end of the day, the exercise leader asked us to write letters to ourselves, which they then mailed to us three months later.  I just found mine:

July 20, 2000

Dear Scheherazade,

    Being watched, seen, supported, encouraged while you do something that is scary or hard feels really good.  Although it sometimes feels artificial, there is something real, powerful, and genuine about community, even those communities you don't choose, those that are transient or formed out of necessity/convenience.

    Give that feeling to yourself by making sure you have a community.  Give it to others by letting them feel safe around you.

    It's October when you'll be getting this letter and you've figured some things out.  Remember to make room in your life for: sun/stretching/exploration.  Solitude & sacredness.  Community & teams.  Connection feels great.

    Think about [Name]'s loyalty and how winsome it is -- his willingness to sacrifice for the group.  For whom do you display such selflessness / devotion?

    You're doing great.  Love, Scheherazade

Good Riddance: Tea Party

The tea drinking project continues slowly.  I revisited the old stash of Hu Kwa lapsang souchang in the back of the cabinet.  It's good.  Far better than Adagio's lapsang souchang, which has a bitter aftertaste, and which had led me to forget why I once loved the smoky lapsang. 

We are considering reenacting the Boston Tea Party and dumping a bunch of tea in the harbor in protest.  It would expedite what will otherwise be a long journey through disfavored teabags.   On the top of the list of things to protest is the inequitable distribution of snow in the neighborhood, because of the path the snowplow takes.  Huge mountain of snow across my driveway, little teeny mound across the street.  Every storm.  It breeds resentment and suspicion.

I've decided to blame well-meaning friends for the overstock of bad tea.  A note to friends of tea-drinkers: don't give tea as a gift, unless you yourself are a serious tea drinker and know what you are doing.  I have received a lot of bad tea this way.  Of course I can't throw it out.  And now I have to drink it.  Yecch.  The worst of it is some kind of absurd herbal stuff called "Forest equinox" that smells like juniper berries and tastes like moss.  The supply seems infinite.   

Good Riddance Project: Miscellany

Ridding the house of clutter has brought a lot of buried memories to the surface.  I've been sorting through memorabilia in my new office, now that the rooms are cleared and the basement is empty.  I've got a file box left, plus a pile of odds and ends (where did all of these sunglasses come from?).  And the reviewing is complicated.  Painful, sometimes.   Friendships now lost become vivid again in a folder of letters.  Photographs where I can see in hindsight what's to come.  My own writings -- quotations and notes scribbled to myself, stuffed into a folder.  Sometimes I wince at how far I've come since then.  Other times I cringe to discover that I'm re-treading a path or a problem I've worked on before.  How do I have insights and then lose them again, how am I still mucking around in the same swamp when way back then I seemed to be finding my way to firmer ground?

While all this is going on, I'm re-reading the book Flow.  I last read this book perhaps in 1996 or 1997.  I find it quite wonderful.  It's about ordering consciousness, creating challenge and living a satisfying life by virtue of the choices you make about where you put your attention.  It's about how the things we feel best doing are those things that absorb us, mentally or physically, where we lose track of time and lose self-consciousness.  The essay about why I love sailing fits pretty well with the principles of the book. 

Meanwhile I'm listening to songs from the past.  My playlist has been very strange and dredges up particular, distinct memories and faces. America's Sister Golden Hair Surprise and a laughing unexpected friendship my junior year of high school; Crowded House's Don't Dream It's Over and the summer I spent with my first true love, before my last year of college; Farmer Not So John's Rise Above The Wreckage and the dark fall of my 1L year, when I escaped my disintegrating relationship by messing around at the college radio station. 

I just found a set of quotations I copied down from a book I read about five years ago.  I of course didn't write down the title but I think it was The Grace of Great Things: Creativity and Innovation.  Here's one (from the author's allegation that innovative minds are innocent, playful minds): 

As innocence is without preconception, so also is it without embarrassment.  Only such a mind is open to inspiration which typically involves the acceptance of outrageous improbability as simple truth.  We might call radical purity of mind naiive or even promiscuous in its random availability to notions, but even this metaphor is inadequate.  Such a mind is not merely receptive to new data, but ready to redefine itself with relation to that data.  Such a mind is hungry for the experience that reveals not only the seen but the seer.

Good Riddance Project: Writing About Sailing

I'm into the intense part of the purging project.  The boxes with old letters and memorabilia.  Good heavens.  I used to be quite a correspondent.  There's a lot to think about, seeing fragments of my old life. 

In my senior year of college I had to tell my life story.  I just found the box with my notes, as well as the box of responses from those who heard me tell it.  Anyway, here's an excerpt I wrote back in 1994 about why I sail.  I've written something similar here and here, but writing this bit was when I really figured out and put words to my love of sailing for the first time:

Why do I sail?  There are simple answers and complex ones to that question.  The simple ones are that my dad is a sailmaker.  I've done it all my life.  It's what one does.  I'm good at it.  Now it has become wrapped around my life so much that it occasionally feels like too much.  I don't live on campus; I live upstairs at the yacht club.  I am a senior on the sailing team and there are many reasons why I couldn't stop sailing.  All the people I know sail whenever they can.  What else would you do on a free afternoon?

Good Riddance: A Letter Returned Undeliverable

                                      5/25/1998
                                      8:38 PM EST
                                     Somewhere over Newark, NJ

Dear J,

           Cruising bumpily along in the back of this 737, breathing very stale air and trying to deflect conversation from the pack of retirees I'm sitting amidst, I'm feeling none of the thrill of flying.  But two mornings ago I was concentrating on not hitting the cloud in front of me while J.T. gently but firmly told me I really ought to nudge the nose up a little more...more... you really need to get level... you're descending, you know... why don't I take it over for a minute?  What a fabulous experience.  It's really hard to keep track of where you're steering, whether you're horizontal, how you're burning fuel, what the clouds are doing, and the dozen other things J.T. was paying attention to while I alternately climbed, dove, and gaped at the Olympic National Park unfolding below us.  I felt once again reminded of what new sailors feel -- like how hard it is just to steer a sailboat in a stright line, and how long it takes for a good "feel" to develop.  Oooh -- it was tantalizing and wonderful and I'm afraid I'm going to have to do it again.  Perhaps many times.  I never thought I could be enticed by a more cripplingly expensive pasttime than sailing.  Maybe common sense will prevail and I'll gradually forget what it felt like to fly. 

     B. and I had a quite grand trip after leaving you.  The San Juan Islands (okay, we only actually set foot on one, Orcas Island, a charmer and a half) are worth your time.  Snag someone with a car or hitchhike to Anacortes with a bike and a tent and get on the feeling.  Orcas may be quite touristy come summer, but B and I had it all to ourselves save a wild bunny or two, or, truthfully, seven or eight, in our campground.

     Vancouver Island was disappointing, but we turned our luck around and scored a free night's stay in a luxury hotel, where we dolled ourselves up and feasted on seafood while making waiters nervous (w/ our great beauty & rapier-like wits of course).  Topped off w/ a morning of working out, swimming, whirlpooling, sauna-ing & rebuffing fools -- then on to Port Angeles, WA, on a spectacular ferry ride marred only by an old woman giving us an unsolicited biography of John Templeton, a man who had a great impact on the financial condition of the Presbyterian Church in Pennsylvania in the 1930s -- for 45 minutes, really.  But that one bad experience shouldn't stop you from checking out Port Angeles, a new potential fantasy-relocation spot for me.  18,000 people, vibrant but totally unpretentious & uncondo-ed (a urologist's office, modest & squat, enjoyed waterfront property in a totally working class neighborhood), with its toes in the Juan de Fuca Strait and its back pressed up against the Olympic Mountains.  I tell you, J, it's sweet. 

Oh, we had no end of fun.  My hand's getting tired, and there's actually a lot of turbulence on this flight.  I gathered a batch of smooth, wonderfully colored stones on Orcas Island with the intention of sending them to you.... but I've become rather attached to them so I'll just keep them for a while and give them to you when you're on the East Coast next, how's that?

Okay -- out of time, room, patience.  I liked your idea of reviving a correspondence -- but I'll like it better when there's something from you in my box.  I'll look for it.  It was really nice to see you.  Let's not go 4 years again before the next time. 

Love,

S

Good Riddance Project: Repatriation

A product of our clutter purge is that we have a bowl of shells and pretty rocks.  Both Housemate and I are guilty of clingy beachcombing.  We get home and empty our sandy pockets onto windowsills and bookshelves.  I'm partial to mussel shells and rocks shaped vaguely like a heart.  Housemate likes odd shaped shell fragments and rocks with stripes in them.  Today I'm going to take three years worth of natural odds and ends -- all the sand dollars I found that wintry day on Popham Beach, and the huge moon shells I found on Scarborough Beach, plus all of our special rocks and shells -- to the little secret beach at the end of my street.  I'll scatter our treasures there for someone else to find.