Meditations On: Making Fun of the “One Thing a Day” Routine

Before moving to Florida in 2008 I spent my Spring Break visiting the folks in Prescott (AZ) doing one last tech-support trip while I was still less than a whole continent away from them. I don’t know if I’d ever spent a whole week with them as an adult where none of us were on some kind of work schedule. I mean, growing up dad was out the door before any of us were awake and mom would get us up before school, and make sure we had our lunches ready and then we were out the door for the day. Then we all ate dinner together when dad got home from work every day, then homework and a little TV then bed. And the weekends were spent either doing housework inside with mom or helping dad work on the yard. That was the routine I remembered.

But during my visit in 2008, I noticed right away that they stayed up much later than before and got up well after sun-up. I knew that mom had been the night owl and dad the early bird, and found it interesting that they had more or less adopted mom’s sleeping schedule. The next thing I noticed was after a leisurely breakfast (dad still spent his breakfast reading the newspaper), they’d plot out what they were going to do for the day, usually a trip to go shopping at Costco or a doctor visit or where to go for lunch/dinner after they worked on the house for a bit. And then the evening was spent on the couch watching TV with dad driving mom crazy because he’d was constantly switching channels on the remote when he quickly lost interest with what they were watching. Then once or twice a week we’d go out and have dinner somewhere. But it was the one-thing-a-day routine that really stuck with me. It seemed so weird. Weird enough that I wrote about the experience and created one of my first podcast episodes thinking about the visit (4-Days in the Valley). Then I retired… which forced an attitude adjustment about my folks’ daily routine.

An acquaintance asked how I was doing and I wrote: Adjusting to retirement, after living a life running on someone else’s schedule, it’s an interesting challenge to work the time management machine for oneself… it’s a good problem to have. ???? I might have undersold the challenge that I’ve been experiencing when it comes to how I’m doing with my time-management. This week begins my second year of Not-Teaching and you’d think after one how year of not having the around the clock pressure of being a middle school public school educator I would have taken whatever time I needed to recover and get things going. But finding center for oneself after 28-years at the wheel goes a bit deeper than what time might be needed to get over having a slight cough or minor change in “the daily routine.” Yeah, I slept a lot the first few months and I know I did a lot of “important stuff” on my computers and websites (including trying to backup all of my work, particularly the course work and curriculum I had created over the last three or four years). So, in a way I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do, but gathering what I had done so that I had a record of the work, should I choose to write about it or use the materials for other work in the future. I just know that I had to get things backed up off of the CMS/LMS servers and my district Google accounts while I still had access.

Then I focused on whether I was “really” going to retire or find different work that was education or writing adjacent. One of the complicating issues was my lack of experience outside of teaching and if the job under consideration would pay more than what I would be getting just staying at home. Over the course of the year I never heard back from any of the journalism jobs that I applied for (except for a nice rejection email from City Cast Las Vegas). In the education adjacent department, I felt very undervalued when I didn’t get a call back for a job as a library assistant position from the local library district. Things sunk further when I didn’t get a call back for a part time job coaching for a private school’s First LEGO League robotics team. Yeah, that one didn’t feel so great.

Then I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal about professionals retiring because they felt like they had nothing else to prove and, except for the economic achievement part, that kind of rang a bell for me.

Teaching was never about proving something or having some vaunted personal goal. It was about doing something good with the skills I had to the benefit of those whom I taught and worked with. I wasn’t there to be heard but to help. And quite frankly, after 28 years, I knew I was mostly not being heard and that my efforts weren’t being the help that I was hoping for, and that it would be better for me to step away from the classroom and spend my energy and whatever time I had left in this world writing and enjoying not having to “guide” uncooperative proto-humans or justify my existence to a bean-counter/local politician/administrator.

But after a lifetime of working or existing at the behest of someone else’s clock it has been a struggle finding a balance that works for me. I wonder how my dad did making that adjustment. I know my mom retired many years before dad and enjoyed sending him to work and then having the day to herself and expressed her concern that he would kind of “ruin it” once he retired. But I guess, based on them switching to her “later” schedule that they made the adjustments. It’s too bad that I never thought to talk to them about this. I do know that as my dad’s health declined he did struggle making adjustments so that he could do things that he loved even if not exactly as he would were he a younger person (like wrestling trees and climbing up on the two story roof to make repairs). He had been someone who liked to jog, but when he was limited to walking he just didn’t like it as much and therefore didn’t really do it because it wasn’t jogging. He was also someone who loved working with plants and in the yard and I wished he would have taken up something like working with bonsai, that felt landscaping adjacent to me, instead of the long hours of falling asleep in front of the TV that I witnessed.

I guess I shouldn’t have made fun of their one-thing-a-day routine. At the beginning of the pandemic I wrote up a couple lists on my white boards to help me make the adjustments to this new way of navigating my daily life(yes, I have white boards at home…). The first one, that I made in March, I think I got off of a website or something and was a bit more general in approach:

The second list, that I made in July, was more specific to my own needs and I think I might repost and make a better effort to note on my calendar when I’m doing some of the things on this list:

Thinking that I just never had the time before to consider what I really wanted to do just isn’t going to cut it any more, even if I find myself reduced to my folks’ one-thing-a-day routine. Hope y’all are coping and doing great at whatever stage in life you find yourself.

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