Chicken Egg
The surest indication I have that I'm living a pretty privileged life is that I have the luxury of wondering what I'm supposed to be, like, doing. Not necessarily in the day-to-day; I've got a job to go to and lots of stuff to do there and then there's chores and eating and sleeping and washing and all that, of course. I mean doing doing. Or maybe that's been a question fermenting in the back of my head forever and now that everything else feels pretty squared-away, Maslow-wise, I've finally come across the old jar bubbling away and have the wherewithal to prod it and see what's goopin' around in there.
I forget what particular chain of thoughts brought all this up, but I know for sure I was on the bus on my way to work looking out the window. On my old job early morning schedule window seats were easy to come by and I took them for granted; now the level of calculation I bring to bear on the question of which seat to choose is staggering. i try to choose a seat close to someone with a window seat who looks like their stop will come sooner rather than later, which is in itself a sub-calculation that brings in assumptions about what job someone might be going to which comprises further sub-sub-calculations that take place in the wayback of my brain drawing both on my data about the different neighborhoods on the route and also probably some classist and racist programming that I'm probably going to be trying to extirpate forever. But that's a disquisition for another day.
In any event I had a window seat. The sun was coming up and we were heading east, where the skyscrapers were already basking in the dawn that had slid under the clouds bumping up against the lakeshore. By midmorning the sunlight would be clotted up behind the never-quite-raining cumuleses (cumuli?), but at that point it was still runny, flowing westward down Grand Avenue. It's not necessarily a picturesque street, vacant lots giving way to row houses and small buisinesses, and then some more vacant lots with chain link fences in better repair when things start getting a bit classier. Then nicer iterations of the buildings and then we're in downtown proper with all the glass and architectural gewgaws that entails.
No, I didn't have a window seat, now that I think of it. Or more likely this is one of those subtle thought processes that has managed to insinuate itself into my routine, a little trickle of connected ideas that wears a groove over time. Funny to realize that that can happen in a non-harmful way. Huh.
So, I was sitting in one of the side-facing seats toward the back this morning, that at least I can say for sure.The bus was crowded but I was managing to keep myself and my backpack and my coat edges and my travel mug within the invisible boundaries of my area. The woman next to me was doing the same, both of us sort of out of politeness and sort of out of the human version of crown shyness and also a little tiny bit of passive aggressive "I'm following the bus rules, if we end up bumping elbows it's on you." Man, public transit is complicated when you get down to putting it into words.
I listen to music most of the time on my way to work. People are pretty quiet since it's early so it's just a nice way to feel private so I can let myself sink into a pleasant ruminative state. It isn't really significant, what I was listening to, because I noticed that there's no way to predict what song is going to elicit what, even if I put on the same playlist at the same time of day.* But somehow things lined up and the train yard we were passing, with all the disconnected lined-up cars and buildings and service vehicles gilded with all the sun that had made it that far west, was strangely moving in an epic kind of way. I'll kind of skip ahead through the intervening bits of ideas about Human Effort because if I try to pin them down it will take forever and sound like some Third Time Ever Smoking Weed type nonsense (even though it isn't). Anway, I got to the bit where I said to myself "Self [given this whole trainyard and music situation and also everything that has ever happened in our entire life so far as well] what are we, uh, supposed to be doing, in general?"
It's one of those chicken egg things, where I feel like if I approach the question from the angle of what I want to be doing in a way that is, I don't know, super pure of heart, then I'll get somewhere. But then, you know, mostly what I want to do is what's pleasurable, so there goes the heart purity pretty much. I don't mean pleasure in, like, a purient way, but still. And then from the other end I know that I have no logical ethical compass due to not having a head for abstract concepts and I tend to do as I ought merely because doing what I oughtn't is generally less pleasurable in the long run. So I'm kind of stuck with muddling through this, impure of heart but at least trying. I sneakily tried to answer myself with "What should we be doing? Obviously we should be trying!" but even I know that dog won't hunt. Ditto "Self-actualizing, of course!"
So far, what I've got for a list of (non-prurient, non-Maslow-basic) things that bring me pleasure:
1. Going on walks
2. Making stuff
3. Writing
4. Talking to people who get my deal and whose deal I get (an edge case, because people are way complicated)
Hoo damn, it's getting late, but anyway I got off the bus and was like "Oh, huh, mostly the source of pleasure for those things is noticing."
So, fuck you, myself. We're supposed to be doing noticing. Until I ride the bus tomorrow and see sunlight on a different thing while a different song is playing and realize that's actually not it at all.
*Interestingly, the clearest correlation I've observed is that when I'm about five-six days out from the theoretical date of my next period, I really groove to sad complicated lo-fi guitar lurching.