My Widest Regret

Today was delightful, sunny, quiet, fairly warm, and very spring-like. The projects on which I worked were frustrating, however. It seemed that everything I did took care of the issue needed, but also revealed a problem hidden beneath the original. Caring for the second revealed a third, etc...  I think I would have found the day frustrating were it not for the people with whom I had contact in trying to complete the tasks at hand.

This evening, by the way, we had a simple peasant style stew with browned ground beef, and great oversized chunks of vegetables poking above the bowl rim with thin slices of Swiss cheese and a wine that I bought a few months back and haven't gotten around to trying. The wine was a 2005 Vino Nobile Di Montepulciano from the Corte Alla Flora vineyards (Italian). It is a 3 grape wine and we really enjoyed it. It presents from crisp and clean on the front end to earthy and substantial on the back. I kind of thought of a Chianti but it is more sophisticated, both thinner and taller. Not an everyday wine for me, and definitely beyond our simple dinner, but it would be great with anything from an intensely flavorful pasta to a filet mignon and I recommend it.

One of the projects for the day was to finish getting the boat ready to drop in and to clean some of the remnants of projects long planned and long forgotten from the area by the boat so that the trailer can more easily approach. And moving that stuff one more time, without a definite need for it, and looking around at all the other stuff I have accumulated over the years brought me up hard.The truth is that I have acquired and collected stuff over the years as I knew that someday I would find a use for it. In addition, I have taken on innumerable projects under the guise of living a full and well purposed life.

While I have learned much from the handful of projects which I actually took from imagination to reality, I have more frequently obtained parts of the project without ever proceeding with any level of completion. So now I look around my yard and see, quite frankly, a mess. For a while I had storage a mile a way, but that land sold and I needed to move the collection out. As a storage unit for all my false starts would need to be barn big, the only realistic option was to move everything here.

So I am faced with a daily reminder of my varied interests and, at times, convince myself that it shows a richness of interest and even a quality of intellectual pursuit. But I kid myself. What is shown instead is a life habit of taking on projects for distraction's sake. Somewhere along the road I decided that frantic busyness was the same as a rich quality of life. In place of experiencing some things deeply, I experienced many things shallowly. This I regret. While there is time enough in the week to do anything you want, there is not enough time in the week to do everything you want. I think if my yard were more empty, my life would be less. It is good to learn new skills and take on new challenges and be useful and engaged with mind and hand. I need to clear out and start with a new paradigm of that which is worth my time. But how do I get rid of all this cool stuff?