Aimless On Leave

Time. That's what a leave is for. Sometimes it means escaping media, new and old. And sometimes it is for escaping into media, new and old. My mental image for my leave is this photo of the sea on a grey day. Waves. Shore. Horizon. I keep using it in my meditations on what it means to have time for the first time in well over a decade because there is nothing still about this year and nothing still about this image. And yet there is something constant and calm in the midst of the motion. I still haven't figured out why, but this leave year has been that way for me. Even with the overwhelming (pun intended!) success of the MacArthur Competition (a full time job by anyone's standard), I still feel on leave a lot of the time. Many days (not all, maybe not even most) I've been able to keep my leave alive and present which is to say calm and centered. Whole days where I do nothing but read a book. Whole days when I don't even do that. I walk in the woods. And think. Really think. On Facebook, my profile for the year says I'm at an undisclosed location in the Bahamas. (Same mental image as this photograph of the Pacific except turquoise and warm and clear.) Some days, I surf all day, surf the web, thinking and connecting and linking, not even sure what I want to find which means I find (always) far more than I ever could have sought. The undisclosedness is the nicest fiction of all. Impossible to pinpoint. Aimless. Maybe aimlessness makes a leave. Aimlessness in a life usually fraught (another pun intended) with deadlines. This project on "knowing" may well be a book. Pages are piling up on my table. I seem to find myself gravitating more and more toward a new field called neuroanthropology. But it is never (I repeat: never) the book that makes the leave. If I succeed, the book will be the byproduct not the product of the leave. The sideshow, not the main attraction. Maybe at the end of all this year at my fantasy undisclosed location on the shore of balmy or turbid water somewhere, I will understand how I was able to find some aimless days in the midst of a too orderly and ordered life. Right now, even trying to figure that out feels wrong.  Instead, I will end here with a new year's wish to all: Peace. Peace now. On every level. My friend Priscilla is waiting and we'll walk together, the way we often do, on a loop through the woods, ending up where we began and, in another sense, not in the same place at all.