on hiatus

Friends, I seem to be on hiatus for the time being.

Now in the mornings I find myself often wanting just to press on with my research notes rather than pausing to write a blog-post. With a project so long in the making, I'm following that impulse.

Things are going reasonably well. The mornings are dark now: it's still mostly dark outside my blinds, which I have yet to open. I was out in the chilly morning to take out the recycling and unlock the garbage-box behind our building. I really like the autumn, a time of promise in some obscure way. In the bustle of work, especially in the dark of morning, when people are returning to their tasks after lounging in the summer, I feel a sense of quiet ease and relaxation--and did even when I was part of that bustle. The world continues to be beautiful, even as people rush through it. You just have to tune your attention to it.

So that's it: I'm officially on vacation from my blog. Many thanks to all of you who have dropped by and read my thoughts. I wish you well.

disaster redux

Autumn descends on us, with the mornings turning chilly and damp. Roofers have been at work on our building over the past two weeks, and in the past three days have been right over our unit, ripping and thumping, making the wooden structure tremble. Down here in my office I'm as far from that action as I can get, but I do have young guys passing to and fro by my office window, carrying sheets of plywood and answering calls to their cell-phones.

Kimmie is still undergoing the long tail of this headcold (mine is pretty much completely gone). Her voice is still wispy and her ears are plugged. Another way of marking the change of season.

In the wider world we have the ructions of the financial and stock markets. We're overdue for an economic depression, so I'm expecting one--and expecting it to be long and severe. I believe that when historians look back on this era, they will shake their heads at how so many government policies and private practices could have been undertaken that were so wrongheaded and that led so surely to disaster--much as historians now look at the policies and practices that led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Ben Bernanke, the head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, is a scholar of the Great Depression. But policymakers, like generals, are always refighting the last war rather than addressing the situation before them.

I've mentioned before how events have the look of the three-stage unfolding of an ancient Greek tragedy: koros, hubris, and ate (surfeit, outrageous behavior, and disaster). By the time of the great tragedians of Athens, ate had come to mean objective, external disaster--retribution for one's ill-starred actions. But as E. R. Dodds observes in his book The Greeks and the Irrational, the term ate in earlier, Homeric times had a different meaning:

Always, or practically always, ate is a state of mind--a temporary clouding or bewildering of the normal consciousness. It is, in fact, a partial and temporary insanity...

But what is insanity? Literally, it means mental unhealthiness or unwholesomeness. A disconnect from reality.

That sounds like what starts the tragic cycle. For koros is "surfeit" according to Arnold J. Toynbee--doing too much of something. But doing too much of something is itself a sign of lack of realism: you have too high a regard for your own powers to control things, to make things go as you wish. You lack humility, and so are led on to hubris, "outrageous action"--doing things that reflect your unrealistic self-assessment. You make big mistakes. And the locomotive of big mistakes pulls a train of painful consequences--ate.

So I suppose ate, the painful consequences, can be viewed from either the external angle (disaster) or from the internal angle ("insanity"). For external disaster in itself is neutral, you might say; it is our response to it, our feelings about it, that constitute its pain and suffering. Ate then seems to be both the disasters caused by our foolish actions, and the suffering that results.

One dark note of the "insanity" model is that it doesn't suggest learning. The crazy person, after an "episode", gradually becomes quiescent again. Peace returns--and further opportunities for surfeit...

I think it was Voltaire who said:

History never repeats itself;
Man always does.

What can I say? Here we go again.

awake

I'll quickly check in here. Again I got up in the night to do some reading. This is becoming a pattern. Part of the pattern is that when I return to bed (this morning at about 3:50) I lie awake, then eventually doze and have a dream that startles me awake again right away. The dreams are often about being intruded upon by strangers, or being spied on through windows by them--creepy.

However, there is no downside to reading as far as I can tell (if there is, I'm in big trouble). And time in the dead of night is truly free time.

A few days ago I updated my computer-security program (Kaspersky), and now, with better protection, I can't find a way to access the stats for who visits my blog--one of my main rewards for writing it. I'll try to puzzle that out.

Now: back to more research...

back to school

I'll take a quick pause from my morning research to write a post.

Labor Day has just passed, and today is the universal day of "back to school"--a stronger feeling of New Year for me and many others than the holiday on 1 January. For all those years growing up life changed on the Tuesday after Labor Day, and one literally entered a "new year" of one's education.

It's a perfect back-to-school day here: a slight chill in the air, a faint mistiness in the morning air, and the green trees tinged with yellow and orange, the first blush of autumn.

Am I "back to school"? I suppose I never left it. Maybe I'm like the young Ebenezer Scrooge, the solitary boy left behind in the classroom, working while his mates were off home for the holiday. But I'm not here because I lack alternatives. I like what I'm doing, and feel vaguely anxious and off-course if I'm forced away from my solitary research. I'm motivated, because at some level I'm doing this not for myself but for others. Yes, solitary as I am, I'm working for others.

late-night reading

The rain plops heavily outside again. A series of sirens has screamed by in the dark of morning.

I prepared for sleeplessness again last night, setting out my sweatpants and fleece top for easy access in the dark. It turned out I needed them: awake at 1:45, I rose again at about 2:30 to head downstairs to read. Might as well make the night productive. This time I opened The Lupercalia, a bound dissertation by a certain Alberta Mildred Franklin, written for her PhD at Columbia University in 1921. There was exactly one copy of this available via Abebooks. That was in Stockholm, Sweden. I bought it for just under 30 euros (including shipping).

I'm glad I did. I sat hunched over the coffee-table, highlighter in hand, flipping through the surprisingly well-made paper-bound document, and sipping a glass of cranberry juice. All quiet in the house; all quiet in the dark outside.

I read for just over an hour: wolf-cults in ancient Greece; wolf-cults in ancient Italy...

I felt fatigued but not especially sleepy. "So this is insomnia," I thought. I've never really had it before.

I crept back upstairs and back into bed. I mainly lay there, but did eventually drift in and out of a very light sleep. I know this because I had dreams. I noticed also the changes in the level of my consciousness as I lay in those hours. Thoughts and images would arise unbidden, spontaneously, and I knew that I was closer to sleep--and by then I had veered back to full wakefulness.

Now, I feel reasonably rested. I'll head on with the day, and see what it brings. One thing I can say: I'm excited by the ideas I'm researching and connecting. They may even be partly what is keeping me up nights.

sleeping, reading

It's dark and rainy outside. Except for all the leaves on the shrubs and trees, it could be a November day. I like this kind of variety in the weather.

Yesterday I felt underslept after a semi-sleepless night. I'd got up at about 2:30 to come down to the living-room and read for an hour. Except for the lack of sleep, I kind of enjoy getting up in the middle of the night. All is quiet and dark, and there are no expectations on one at that time--it is truly your own time. Over two glasses of cranberry juice I read a book I bought at Chapters on the weekend: Caesar: The Life of a Colossus by Adrian Goldsworthy. So far: excellent. I'm highlighting most of every page. Although the book is big, Goldsworthy wastes no time--every word tells. He's a very good writer of history.

Last night I took half a Sleep Aid, and slept very well. Indeed, I was greedy for more when the alarm went off at 5:30, but had to get up.

Now: on with the day. It is so dark out there it could almost be night, with the shrubs gleaming dully in the light of a full moon.

free, classless, urbane

Rain falls through the cool air. In the night, when I removed one of my earplugs, I heard the drumbeat of drops falling on a plastic fitting of the downspout system outside.

It was another wakeful night after 2:25. I reckon I need to return to my sometime practice of getting up to read. I might as well use the time to push my project ahead in some small way.

As it was, my mind was busy in the dark, zipping over wide terrain, not all of it negative. My thoughts had an excited, energetic quality, which made me sure that sleep was not to be forthcoming.

When I got up, I made coffee and read a couple of pages more of Livy's History of Rome (a downloaded public-domain version translated by D. Spillan and published in 1879). Then, unsure what notes I wanted to type, I got an intuitive desire to fetch Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism from my bookshelf. I'm working at learning to trust these hunches, so I got the book and flipped to its conclusion, where I had last left off typing a couple of months ago. I was thrilled with what I found waiting for me there.

One thing that struck me was this quotation from Matthew Arnold:

Culture seeks to do away with classes.

Needless to say, this is no Marxist sentiment. Frye followed it with this gloss:

The ethical purpose of a liberal education is to liberate, which can only mean to make one capable of conceiving society as free, classless, and urbane.

I relived my feeling of amazement when I first read that sentence. It could easily form the thesis of a book or a series of books--or the basis of a lifetime of contemplation.

I don't think I can even say much about it. I will only note that I regard Frye, along with Joseph Campbell, as a key inspiration for me in affirming the value of the arts and of artists. Many people value art and artists, but these men have been among the most articulate, for me, in accounting for exactly why art is so important to the human enterprise, and therefore why artists matter.

For much of our lives, we are not too different from chickens in a laboratory, pecking at the green triangle or the yellow star to make corn drop into a trough. Our emancipation from that condition depends, first and foremost, on artists. In that spirit, I press on.

restless mind

I woke at 2:15 and never did go back to sleep. Too much to think about.

I've commented before about the difference in mentality, in emotionality, between day and night. I notice very strongly how differently I think and feel about things, even when fully conscious (that is, not just in the twilight of near-dreaming). At night my thoughts are much more emotionally flavored; my feelings are much stronger and more raw.

In astrology this is accounted for by the fact that the night is ruled by the Moon, which also rules our feelings.

One of my thoughts was that this is probably our mental state as we approach--and perhaps go through--death. It is likely a "nighttime" rather than a "daytime" experience, and we should prepare ourselves accordingly.

By that I mean that we should attend to those things in life that cause us to lose sleep, for they will very likely be the things troubling us on our deathbed.

Not all of my thoughts were painful, of course. A lot of what was keeping me awake was thoughts of fun and amusement--following interesting lines of inquiry and memory. I thought about astrology, for instance, and tussled with some exciting aspects of my current research.

There's lots to do for a restless mind.

at my post

Back (or still) at my post.

Ah, yes, my post: here at this computer, at this desk. I call it "desk", but in fact it is a white melamine Scandinavian-style kitchen-table that Kimmie bought in 1985 when she was still single and living in an apartment. We were going out together and I had not yet moved in with her. I scolded her at the time for having lugged the table up the apartment-building's stairs by herself. She should have got me to do that--or at least got me to help her. But Kimmie, born in the year of the horse, is accustomed to carrying loads and thinks nothing of it. (I'm year of the dog--a harmonious companion of the horse, according to the Chinese texts.)

When we bought this townhouse in 1987, we also bought a pine table and chairs to serve as our dining suite, then situated immediately by the living-room, indeed as part of the same space. The white table was moved to the kitchen to function as the everyday table at which we ate. In late 1989, when Warren and I were trying to come up with TV shows after our success with "What's Wrong with Neil?", we bought a PC together--an early number with a text-only, black-and-white screen--and set it up here in my office. I needed a table for it, so I executed a plan Kimmie and I had been talking about, and moved the Ikea dining-furniture into the carpeted space adjoining the kitchen, clearing the living-room space for other uses, and brought the white table downstairs.

Kimmie was irritated that I'd stolen the white table, but I pointed out that I needed a table, it was the perfect size and type for my needs, and with our new dining configuration there was nowhere to put the white table in any case. I wasn't about to buy a new table, only to store the white one in the windowless concrete space of our storage-room. She was actually delighted with the change in the upstairs configuration, so quickly got over her loss.

The old Packard-Bell computer I finally replaced in December 1998 with a Dell that had an actual color monitor and graphical user interface. (I'd touched my first computer mouse in 1996 when I worked as a mail clerk at an ICBC claim center.) Since then I've become reasonably proficient in using a personal computer.

But I still have the old white table that Kimmie bought when we were first going out. It's my post--I'm at it.

back to work

Back from "vacation".

Kimmie has had a week off, and today returns to the Corporation to resume the stresses of contract development, her new job. I too took a week "off".

What does that mean in my case? First of all: no waking to an alarm-clock. This morning the alarm was again set to ring at 5:30, but Kimmie's bedside clock lay silent through the past week. That meant sleeping in till 7:00 each morning, and therefore a day shaped differently from the usual "work" day.

I would still key my research notes over morning coffee--what else would I do? I enjoy that, and it gives a feeling of forward motion, however spurious.

The real "vacation" lay in not opening up my chapter-notes to struggle with my story. This is the daunting and anxiety-producing part of the work, and therefore the part from which I seek any excuse to avoid--including the excuse of being on "vacation". For a week I gave myself permission to leave the beast alone.

As usual we stayed close to home, except for an overnight trip to Vancouver Island to visit my father (very nice, and with excellent dining as always). We did some neighborhood walks and bought Kimmie a dress-form at Dressew downtown for her birthday--and Kimmie did spend plenty of time in her "mad scientist's lab" of sewing creations in Robin's old bedroom, in the summer heat and with the noise of traffic blasting in the open window from Keith Road.

Now it's time to take up cudgels again and measure my powers against the waiting monster of my work. O terrible foe.

vacationland

Kimmie is taking this week off, so I will likely take a break from blogging, to enjoy a freedom from the usual routine.

Summer has hit Vancouver full-on: it's been hot and sunny and clear. Twilights have settled into soft blues and mauves, with the sounds of swishing leaves and people's laughter on the streets.

quiet life

It's hard to describe the writing process as I'm now practicing it. There is a feeling of tunneling in, digging into the ideas and characters that I've got, searching for a nucleus, for the linkages.

Research is continuous. In some ways I feel that a work of fiction or drama is as much a matter of research as any work of nonfiction, or even of science. And, in many ways, the more fanciful your story, the more its underlying network of consistent relationships, of rules, needs to be solid and worked out. Somewhere in the mysterious chemistry of fact and fancy emerges the special cocktail of familiarity and strangeness that is a story. A good story, anyway.

Summer heat is upon us. Right now (7:26 a.m.) the green central area between our building and the buildings next door is still in shade. The sun strikes the lane beyond the low canyon between our buildings, and the sky is clear blue over the gray expanse of the long roof across the lane. It is quiet except for the whir of two fans in my computer.

I wanted a quiet life in which to think and write, and, outwardly, I've got it.

another day

I've been taking it easy, blogwise. Kimmie took an extra-long weekend over Canada Day (and had dental surgery on Wednesday), and I fell in with vacation mode alongside.

But even in vacation mode I keep on reading, researching. It can never be "enough", except in the sense that there comes a point when I feel willing to dare writing more of my story based on what I've learned so far. The creative urge pushes me on, even if only slowly, like viscous lava rolling slowly down the side of a volcano.

The great majority of research material that I uncover I will never use. Rather, it helps me to feel at home in my world, helps me make choices that feel real to me.

I hear the clunk of Kimmie's footsteps in the kitchen upstairs as she prepares a blender-drink breakfast for herself. Outside the weather is cooler and still: even the frail leaves of the Japanese maple hang motionless in the morning air. I hear the wavering drone of an airplane, but other than that, only the breathy whir of my computer's fan.

Another day, another day.

the writer's Monday-morning status

I'll check in here with a brief note. Feeling underslept, having awoken at about 4:00. I've beavered away at my research notes and reading. Now is the usual time for a blog-post, but I'd like to save some energy today and see if I can get a bit more direct project-work done. It's a long shot, but worth a try.

Outside: mild sunshine. I'm looking forward to a nap later today.

out with the old, in with the more complicated

Back to the routine of regular life. Kimmie prepares to head off again to the office, out into the still-gray weather that also characterized our week of vacation here at home. I too will try to return to full productivity.

Of course, I kept up with my reading and my notes over the vacation. To me those things are not mere duty, but what I do for pleasure as well. For better or for worse, I'm not in the situation of Stephen King, who did his actual creative writing 365 days a year because that was what he enjoyed. For whatever reason, and to whatever end, my approach is much more deliberate.

Early in our week off our old television packed it in. It had been an excellent set over all--a Sony, about 24 inches I think, that I got in 1990 on a rent-to-own basis because I was unemployed (oops, I mean a full-time TV series creator). A couple of times in the preceding week the set had switched itself off and then on again in the middle of a program. On Saturday night (June 1), just as we were starting to watch our weekly movie (The Bridges of Madison County in this case), it switched itself off and I could not get power restored to it. We wound up watching the movie on my new laptop, the sound tinny and faint from the speaker even with the computer close to us, resting on top of the coffee-table.

The next day we headed to Future Shop in Park Royal to look for a new set, and wound up buying one--or rather a whole system, since to be fully high-definition-ready it seems you need not just a TV set but also a digital set-top box, and ideally also an expensive HDMI connecting cable to carry the signal between them. The price of all this was about double the maximum amount I'd regarded myself as prepared to pay.

But when it comes to technology purchases, or indeed anything that I really want, I don't like to scrimp. If I only buy a TV every 18 years, I want to get one that's near the front of the technology, not at the rear, so the thing can last.

We went for it. The package consists of a Sharp 32-inch LCD flat-screen television with a Motorola set-top box that includes a 160-gigabyte hard drive for recording programs. The TV is plenty big enough, since we sit quite close to it (I think of a saying my father used to invoke from time to time: "white man build big fire, sit far away; Indian build small fire, sit close".) And the picture and sound are excellent--a leap beyond what we had, for sure.

There are some negatives. The new system is complicated to use--two more remote-control units. And the user's guides that come with the units are poor. Indeed, the Motorola guide is laughably inadequate. The page on using the video-recording feature is simply a list of features, with not one word on how to use the thing. Easily the worst user's guide I've ever seen. If I were interested in chasing copywriting work, I'd write Motorola and offer to write a better one.

Robin, who already has a digital flat-screen TV, wondered why we need a set-top box. Doesn't the digital signal just come through the cable into the TV, as on hers? Our salesman insisted that we can't get a full high-definition signal without the set-top box, so we got it. But as to precisely why that is, I don't know--and my user's guides certainly won't tell me. So, as ever, I'm taking matters into my own hands: I shopped for and bought a book on digital TV from Amazon.com a couple of days ago. I'll wait for that and hope it straightens me out--or at least that I can tell Robin why we sprang for a $650 piece of auxiliary equipment to go with our new TV set.

Meanwhile, TV is very enjoyable again. This past Saturday we watched Apollo 13, the next title in Paul's 90s Festival, and it came across powerfully on our new screen.

vacation mode

Kimmie has taken this week off, and so we're in "vacation" mode. That means sleeping in (this morning I staggered out of bed at the late hour of 7:05), and a change away from the usual routine--including blog-posts. I may not be writing more posts until we return to normal next week.

Meanwhile, it looks like we've got rain for much of our vacation week--plus there are roofers working next door. I don't mind hammering, but power tools are a blight on suburban life. To their credit, these guys run power tools quite seldom--not as much as all the gardeners attending to the grounds of the townhouses hereabouts (including ours). For me it increasingly means wearing earplugs in the daytime as well as at night, because I can't stand noise.

So: on with it. To all of you who check in to read my blog, thank you--I appreciate your attention.

another one bites the dust

Thundershowers outside. The soft pale pink of rhododendron blossoms and bluebells glows under the gray sky.

Yesterday was Victoria Day in Canada; Kimmie and I relaxed in the prolonged weekend, and put up wall-shelves in her sewing-room to accommodate the growing crowd of Barbie-dolls clothed in her sumptuous creations. She bought about a half-dozen dolls over the weekend at Value Village in Vancouver--all brunettes this time. Lovingly she washed the dolls and shampooed and, yes, conditioned their hair. (Kimmie never had Barbie-dolls as a girl.) More models for her small-scale couture.

As for me, more reading, more notes. I left off reading Spartacus, a historical novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the pen name of Scottish writer James Leslie Mitchell, who died in 1935 at age 33, having, according to one source at least, apparently worked himself to death (not how I plan to go!).

Gibbon, a passionate socialist, was a talented writer, but I found that, even though I was most interested in the period and the events (I bought the book precisely because it was about the Spartacus slave revolt), the narrative did not hold me. I was influenced partly by the reviews on Amazon.com, which were ecstatic.

What went wrong? Gibbon's style is appealingly vivid and terse. He packs a lot into the opening sentence, for instance:

When Kleon heard the news from Capua he rose early one morning, being a literatus and unchained, crept to the room of his Master, stabbed him in the throat, mutilated that Master's body even as his own had been mutilated: and so fled from Rome with a stained dagger in his sleeve and a copy of The Republic of Plato hidden in his breast.

It's an eventful first sentence, to be sure. I especially liked the detail that the slave is carrying a copy of the Republic. But this purely outer view of the action proved to be Gibbon's way of narrating all the action in the book. We never get too much inside characters' heads, and thus the story has a rather cinematic quality: sights and sounds without thoughts or feelings. To me, as I think about it, this is a particular weakness in historical fiction, where there is a particular barrier, the gulf of time, to the modern reader's being able to identify with characters and feel connected to the story. Getting inside characters' heads is exactly how to make a modern reader feel at home in the ancient world.

When Robert Graves wrote his Claudius novels he narrated them in the first person, as Claudius, and thus provided an automatic entry to the inner world of his character. Yes, Claudius's ways of thinking and feeling seem strange at times--but at other times not. We recognize him as a person like ourselves, and even have the intriguing thrill of witnessing just how different an ancient person's thoughts are from our own, rather than merely seeing how strange their actions are, and puzzling over why.

Such, anyway, are a few of my thoughts. I had made it just past page 100 of Spartacus, and realized that it was a chore to keep on reading, so I pulled the bookmark and sent the book back to its slot in our bedroom shelf. I pulled out my new copy of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and started (re)reading that instead. I experienced the pleasure of embarking on a story by an experienced, self-assured writer who has something important to say.

So, yes, novel-wise, another one bites the dust.

(not very) sick days as opportunities for freedom

A quick post, just to keep my hand in.

I have some kind of mild gastrointestinal infection that had me fasting for five days (I stopped fasting yesterday). It's also had me living a less structured life, as I typically do when having "sick days". In fact I'm not sick in any meaningful sense--I feel good--but the break in routine of eating and so on makes the day different.

So I continue to follow my research instincts. I'm making discoveries, which creates a feeling of excitement and confirmation. I try to stay open to my intuition, letting instinct guide me from one book to another, one idea to another.

Is this any way to write a work of fiction? I don't know. I don't know if it's properly known what fiction even means. (I think of my old classmate Don's mnemonic device for remembering how to distinguish fiction from nonfiction: "bull" vs. "non-bull".) Northrop Frye also had trouble with this strangely vague but persistent way of categorizing literature.

So I'll press forward, and let it be what it is.

Onward.

cold 'n' sleepless

It's a cold spring: 0° C when I switched on the radio at 5:40. I'd been awake since 3:00. Now it's sunny out there: like a bright winter's day.

Today I have yet another dental appointment--another in the chain of data-gathering sessions about my mouth that seems to be the bedrock of modern dentistry. Since I have some (very slight) unexplained pain in a lower back molar, it's time to use this brute-strength approach.

So just a short "placeholder" post for today, while I go about the business of living my life. Perchance a nap later on...

on (not) wasting time

I awoke at about 3:45 this morning and lay awake.

Without going into detail, there are things bothering me. It happens especially at night. While I might have some qualms about my life situation and decisions during the day, the habitual flow of activity distracts the mind and I'm not troubled. Ah, but at night...

If I look closely at what is bothersome about certain kinds of thoughts, I think it boils down to this: fear of wasting time.

This is not a concern about efficiency. Rather, when I was pressed once to come up with my idea of wisdom, I said this: "A wise person does not waste his time."

What did I mean?

One image that stays pressed in my mind is from watching an interview on CBC television. Evan Solomon was interviewing a former hit-man for the American mob, now living under an assumed identity in an undisclosed location. The hit-man, possibly in his 60s, was matter-of-fact and not shy about talking about his life of crime. He described a few of the murders he had committed--things like shooting someone in the back of the head from the back seat of a car. Once, when shooting someone on his doorstep, he also shot a woman who lived in the same house and who turned out to be a nun.

"Do you regret that one?" said Evan.

"Oh yeah. That's the only one I regret."

By that he meant that all the other victims were also mobsters: guys on the inside who had assumed the risk of getting whacked if they stepped out of line in certain ways. But it turned out he also had regrets over all. Toward the end of the interview, Evan asked him how he would sum up his career.

"A wasted life," the man said.

He said it in the same matter-of-fact way, but I sensed his pain and regret. With those three words he had passed the most damning judgment possible on himself.

I'm not a hit-man, not a mobster. I've done bad things, and from time to time continue to do bad things. But I think the issue of wasting life is not purely a matter of ethics. It arises from a sense that life matters, and that how we spend it matters. Ethics is part of that, but it's not the whole issue. Our mission is not simply to keep our souls pure, but to engage with life in a way that makes full use of our faculties and our uniqueness. Time slips by, and every moment counts. Somehow, it's the very unforced nature of our decisions that puts a heavy responsibility on us.

When I was a temporary monk at Gampo Abbey in 2002, I slept the deep, peaceful, restful sleep of one who had no second thoughts about what he was doing with his life. I knew I was not wasting my time; I was using it to the max.

Now I'm not sure. I'm not plugged in to a structure that has already been given meaning by someone else, so to speak. I'm completely responsible for the meaning of my own life now, and sometimes, well, it keeps me up at night.