Adapting

I did not post an entry yesterday. I was away from home in circumstances where I had no immediately available Internet access. This presented a small challenge to my practice. 

I was reminded of my youth. I worked for many years on evening and night shifts in hospitals. Beginning my day at 3 PM and ending it at 7 AM the next morning took a great amount of adaptation and structure, if I also wanted to have a life. My colleagues were mostly of two definite camps. Some were overweight and depressed. They spent their lives in personal isolation in order to make a living. Others were simply amazingly fit dynamos of creative intelligence.

I made the conscious decision early on to be part of the latter group. I devised a complex schedule of gym work-outs, social dates and even second jobs. I was continually inspired by one particular nocturnal colleague, a British-born nurse, who wrote bodice-ripper novels under an exotic pen name for Harlequin Press during her meal breaks. 'If I can only be like her at that age,' I frequently hoped to myself. Well, I am now older than she was then. 

As I look back, I realize that I would not be able to write a blog like this or have the life I have without being forced to adapt in order to pay my rent. I also realize that same pressure to adapt has left me prone to rigidity in my habits. It takes a certain amount of self-control to write a blog like this every day. But, letting that self-control turn into rigidity would be stifling. Part of my practice is constant adaptation to circumstance from the perspective of maintaining, not stifling, my creativity. 

So, when I found myself off-line yesterday, I was faced with a choice. Would I spend a good portion of a perfectly lovely day in pleasant surroundings searching for a wireless connection, or would I simply enjoy my day and surroundings for what they were. I chose the latter obviously. A measure of my practice, I believe, is the lack of conscious conflict that occurred with that choice.