The Snow Geese

This post came to exist. So there’s that.

Writing was done and finished and posted. This week, that feels like something.

Most days, the getting to having written is relatively painless. The getting started isn’t onerous. The act of writing itself is unlabored. There is no friction in the process between having thought through a post to having written it. And, when finished, I feel a relaxed satisfaction as if I had just eaten a good meal.

I never dread the writing.

Sometimes, I dread the sitting down to write.

The getting situated somewhere and set up and into the right frame of mind mentally to start a session I know will consume all of my focus right up until I am out of time whether I am done or not. That part.

And that feeling makes the sitting down to write harder. It is an impediment of vague size and dimension. It is a boulder of smoke. It may be more vapor than rock but boulders are boulders and therefore cannot just be pushed aside. Such is the nature of boulders. If they were to easy to roll aside, we’d just call them rock balls.

And since this post appears heading toward being some virtual therapy without the copay, I can tell ya that these smoke boulders are always a downstream symptom of something else. They aren’t derivative of a resistance to the writing itself. They’re predictable byproducts of other issues.

• When I don’t have a place to just settle in and work uninterrupted

• When I know I won’t have the time to finish

• When my only slot comes late in the day when I had hoped to still be fresh but am very much not

• When my ‘executive function’ is just shit at the moment

Here on Mike Mountain, there have been a lot of boulders lately. They have just been rolling downhill one after another in alternating waves as I pivot from having my son half the time to then not.

The time when I’ve had him lately has been dominated by the first three circumstance on that little list. And the time when I haven’t has been dominated by the first and last.

When I have him, days are a hopscotch of ubering around from thing to thing from morning until night with one or two slots in there somewhere bracketed by pickups and drop-offs, appointments, and activities.

Those days are filled with ‘kidlines’.

Endless daily cutoffs when you have to drop whatever you’re doing to get your kid, take them somewhere or bring them back. Between are more fragments of time than big chunks.

That condition will abate at some point but not tomorrow. And I have not yet adapted to it.

And the days when I have been theoretically “free” have been stymied by two wholly unrelated issues which are wholly my own personal bullshit.

The first of them is the canyon-wide gap between my expectations of productivity on upcoming unstructured days versus the reality ever achieved.

The unrealistic expectations side is not entirely my fault. If there is one thing people with ADHD love more than stimulation, it is the myth of the Exceptionally Productive Day (EPD).

The Exceptionally Productive Day is a glistening city on a hill. It is a majestic and glorious place where all things are possible in the golden light of a sun that rises and sets much like our own… but, somehow, in the interval between, time ambles along however slowly we need in order to complete a ludicrous assortment of tasks. There is no to-do list too long, no set of assignments too taxing when someone is inside the shimmering gates of an Exceptionally Productive Day.

Now, mind you, the entire fantasy of an EPD hinges on 1) having an eventual day which is wide open and free for doing nothing at all other than the many things saved for it; and 2) being so laser-focused on that glorious day that you tirelessly check off tasks with a beautifully orchestrated precision so crisp and yet graceful, it’s like Swan Lake set to a Swiss watch.

Now, as a rational person, I can tell you that even if a #1 comes along, people with ADHD are neurologically programmed to be absolute shit at pulling off a #2. An open, unstructured day without deadline or external urgency is the worst setup for ADHD productivity.

A person with ADHD is neurologically designed to be better at doing three hours of work in 15 minutes while tied to train tracks and a locomotive is barreling towards them than they are at doing 15 minutes of work with three hours to do it.

(Believe me, we don’t like it any more than you do when our wiring affects us and thus you... In fact, we like it a whole lot less, because it always affects us even when it isn’t affecting you.)

That little neurochemical quirk of ours makes the entire concept of the Exceptionally Productive Day the ADHD version of Oz. There is nothing behind the curtain. It’s a hoax.

As a loyal representative of the ADHD brand – and with a weekly schedule that now requires getting through a harried stretch and then making up for it quickly - I am perpetually starting weeks at a sprint while gazing off at the glorious, shimmering EPDs I’m sure are just on the other side of Running Around Nonstopville.

And then I get to the other side and the shimmer was just a mirage and EPDs aren’t things that exist or exist in the fully imagined sense where days and days of things can be done in a pleasant twelve hours of Swan Lake-choreographed-by-Rolex.

So, that has been, ya know, frustrating.

To add one more little meatball to the plate though, one of the reasons the EPDs haven’t materialized is because I have also had at least a portion of them mentally earmarked for another little project that I have suddenly felt very behind on and under pressure to repair:

Having a Life.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about my son’s available time falling precipitously and how badly I had been doing with that. In it, I mentioned telling him the same thing I always do: he’s a normal kid growing up like normal kids do. I am the one who has fallen behind and needs to catch up and adapt. I meant it.

It is me who needs to adjust to two lives changing too damn quickly. His: the rapidly filling life of a normal high school kid. Mine: the partially emptying life of a parent with a nest that is now empty as often as it is full.

I’ve always known that I’d have to do some serious, deliberate, planned work in the years before my son went off to college to ease me through when he backs out of the driveway and heads off to a semester and not just a friend’s house.

I have literally known for years that I would need to build a scaffolding of people, things, interests, and activities to keep the sight of those taillights from leaving behind an abrupt kind of grief that I then come home to each night.

Over the past ten years, it has been easy when I don’t have my son to merely occupy myself with things that pass the time happily enough. There was so much less time. The blocks were shorter. The intervals between them, longer and more taxing.

It wasn’t hard at all to fill a rare free evening. A good meal and a Guinness maybe. A seat at a pub. Some conversation without work. A relaxed go-when-I-want and come-home-when-I-want. That wasn’t just a reasonable Band-aid; it was just what the doctor ordered.

Now, when I have a solid block of a couple days free, that milling about just isn’t enough.

It’s like the difference between an airport layover of two hours or twelve. Two, you barely feel. Twelve are an eternity.

And twelves are suddenly routine.

That long-imagined eventual need to refill the space in my life that I first emptied to make room for being a single father and then joyously filled with my son, well, it’s here. It showed up suddenly and came early. And now I’m behind.

So, for the last few weeks, I’ve spent the harried first past of the week ping-ponging between things while looking ahead to the next batch of Exceptionally Productive Days during which I would also work on Having a Life.

Toward the latter, I’ve looked ahead at the upcoming shows to see who’s playing and if there are any concerts I can shoot. Two weeks ago, I shot two in three days; brought a friend to the second; and squeezed in making it to a soccer game in between. It was good and fun and busy.

This past weekend, I trekked to some of the major birding spots local birders routinely talk about. The sites were all over 100 miles away, so I found cheap hotels and stayed over and tromped around on dirt roads and through wetlands and saw a thousand snow geese and endless other winter water fowl soon to take their leave of us. I took hundreds of pictures in shitty light which I knew would be mediocre at best but were captures for the memory garden more than the album.

And then after, I went back and sat in a comfortable lobby and went through an entire year’s worth of pictures that had slowly accumulated on two camera cards. Thousands and thousands. Deleted two-thirds. Uploaded the remainder. And then reformatted the cards.

For the first time since last August, there aren’t any pictures I’m worried I might accidentally delete from one place or another because I thought they were in both and the task of actually sorting them out was forever mired on the EPD list.

I slept in comfortable beds and took good, long showers, and felt good about it even as the endless things I was sure I would get done on these Exceptionally Productive Days just sat there like snow drifts on a road that has yet to be plowed.

Sometimes you have to just let the snow be though. So, I did.

The birding spots I hit this weekend… They’re places birders mention endlessly in the little roadside chats we birders have with each other.

“Have you ever been to _____?”

“No, I heard it’s great though…”

“You haven’t?! You HAVE to go… It’s amazing.”

“Yeah, I really need to get there.”

“You really do.”

“Someday.”

Well, this weekend was ‘someday’, I guess.

Did something I had wanted to do for a long time. Made a couple days of it because it would make me happy in the time I now need to work to fill with things like that.

And in between, I slept well. Got the sleep of the dead Friday night. Deep and uninterrupted. It was restful and reviving in the way we of harried lives forget sleep can even be.

It was so refreshing, in fact, I woke up yesterday at 4 am to my batteries fully charged. Grabbed my things and a cup of coffee; beat the sunrise to a preserve; and watched dawn turn to day.

And then I drove straight from there to pick up my son; take him to soccer and then the diner; and then shuttle him home, to the gym, to eat, and then home again.

In the margins of all that, I started this post.

Started writing; put it aside; picked it up again; and then had to put it aside yet again.

By the time my son was in for the night, it was 90% done and I needed just one more hour. So, I ran out to a coffee shop only to find it closed and then ran to my usual pub expecting to sit in a corner and hyperfocus.

At least THIS would be finished.

But then a friend who I’m sort of an older brother to was there at the bar. He has been in a worsening doldrum that started at work but now carries over and grays his entire sky for weeks at a time. He is trying to find his way through it. I would like to see that he does.

So, we sat and talked about careers and satisfaction and happiness and his employer’s recent offer to pay for him to go back to school. And then I pulled up a program in film I knew of at NYU that he could likely get approved at work and would probably love. In the background, the Knicks took the Celtics to double-overtime and then won a thriller as we talked and watched while the place emptied until it was only us left to roll out late.

It had been a 20+ hour day from predawn to past midnight. Photography and driving and time with my son and writing and catching up with a friend in one long blur.

It was, through all of its unplanned hustle and flow, an Exceptionally Productive Day. It was a busy bebop without time used poorly or not at all. Productivity is not always ending with boxes checked as much as having them shaded with a lead pencil toward full.

Yesterday was an EDP. And it was of a kind that I never really credit as ‘counting’.

And so were Friday and Saturday in a way because without them, I wouldn’t have woken up refreshed beyond just rested yesterday and wouldn’t have hustled through the 36 hours since. I wouldn’t have picked this up five times after being forced to put it down just as many.

At some point, I would have dreaded the sitting down to write.

Yesterday, I didn’t. Nor did I today.

The conditions were met for the Colorado highway pass between 90% done and the finish line to be absolutely strewn with boulders. And yet, there weren’t any.

Instead, two-thousand-two-hundred-and-eight words later, I am a few last sentences from having written.

Those last sentences:

Sometimes, you have to go slow to go far.

Sometimes, you have to pull over; get out of the car; stretch your legs; and do nothing more than watch snow geese by the hundreds fly by.

Sometimes, exceptionally productive days aren’t the ones that cover the most miles; they’re the ones that fill you up so you can keep driving.

Sometimes, Having a Life is what allows us to be exceptionally productive not what gets in the way.