Powerless

It is the long-awaited Friday of The Busy Week. I have taught things to university faculty, conservationists, and judges. My new job was announced at work in my absence. I have seen a dear friend launch her new CD and walked around a thermal lake edged by boiling mud. To say I am full-up would be an understatement.

Today was to be my wind-down day. It is the day when I could call my parents for a long talk while I cleaned a house made ragged by my busy period. It was a day when I could go through and answer the important but not urgent email that has been building up in my in-box. It was a day for sending invoices and tidying up. It was a day for regaining connection and regaining control.

When the power first went off this morning, I was mostly untroubled. The power sometimes goes out here, but never for very long. And while I can’t be on the phone or the internet while the power is out, I figured I could take a few minutes over breakfast and just sit and stare at the waves and listen to the surf. A bigger deal is that a colleague is coming to stay tonight, and very late last night when I got home from Melissa’s concert, I didn’t have time to email my future guests with directions to the house. They were to call in the morning, which now wasn’t going to be that helpful as the phones all require power. And I couldn’t email them, because I had no internet.

I called Michael to ask a quick question and mentioned that I hoped the power would come back really soon. “Oh yeah, today is the day it’s out from 9 until 3,” he told me. I can almost not describe the panic that welled up inside me as I realised that each of my plans was attached to the electric wire. I felt waves of sorrow. Not to hear my dad’s voice today? Not to clear out my inbox and write to the friends and colleagues who need my attention? Not even to blast my music and clean the house? I ached with frustration at my day’s plans now in ruins at my feet.

After solving the problem of the colleague who might think I was blowing her off, I sat down to collect myself. These are times in general when we are called to turn challenges into opportunities to be different than we were before. The financial crisis does this, and here this little micro challenge did it too. In many ways, it’s the same challenge. In a world of finite resources (with time being the most finite of all resources and money looking importantly finite), the loss of something we thought we had is devastating. Watching our retirement savings dwindle to negligible amounts this past year has been life altering even if I don’t know what the lessons are. Similarly, the passing of a day without any of the connections or accomplishments I’ve craved is somehow a void, a removal of a felt promise of time.

It wasn’t until I tried to reframe the day from a ruin to a fresh possibility that I recognised what my tunnel vision had done. I had not considered a walk on the beach. I had not considered finishing Twilight (which, ok, everyone is reading but is seriously compelling all the same). I had not considered a day in the garden or painting the cottage out back or or or. My eyes, focused on my plans, missed the possibilities.

The power is due back on in 45 minutes. I have scrubbed the house and kneaded bread dough for challah tonight and rearranged some furniture. I have unpacked from my trip and written this blog. I have taken a little nap. I have spent the day on these little bits of trivia and not felt the little twinge of responsibility saying that I should be doing something else all the time, accomplishing more, not wasting my time. I know that each of these activities would have given me pause on any other day. But today I can putter and knead and stare and dream. Somehow I’m powerless to be productive, which gives me a whole new set of powers. Who knew there was so much possibility for getting what you really need on a day when you don’t get what you wanted?

ps pictures today from the trip to Rotorua, and of us eating our first dinner on the new deck!