An Absorbing Errand

I've thought a lot about this phrase throughout my current decorating project--a phrase I borrowed from Janna Malamud's book by the same title (2012).

Anything can be an absorbing errand--building a shed, restoring a rusty old thing to its former glory, gardening, painting a house, writing, making art, dancing, cooking, conversation, anything that "takes you out of yourself."

When you're thirty, child-rearing may be your absorbing errand, or moving up a career ladder; when you've already done that (or whatever you did when you were thirty), you need something else, something engaging and befitting the life you're living at the moment.

For me, right now, it's transforming a room in my house.  I drive all over the city and the Hill Country looking at fabrics and tables and rugs.  I try something in one spot, then move it, then move it again until it says, "Okay, this is it; this is where I want to be."  

I start with hunches.  I try this, try that, and wait for the click that tells me it's shaping up like I want it to.  It is exactly like writing a story--some characters (much as you love 'em) have to go.  The plot takes a turn you didn't expect and you have to follow it.

When you're absorbed in a project, you are so fully present that you don't obsess over someone not liking you--or anything else that you might obsess about when you have nothing better to do.  You lose track of time; you focus entirely on what you're doing wholeheartedly.

David Whyte once quoted a wise friend of his:  "The antidote to exhaustion is not rest; the antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness."

Janna Malamud Smith (daughter of Bernard Malamud, whose writing I love), says this:

"...Life is better when you possess a stimulating practice that holds your desire, demands your attention, and requires effort; a plot of ground that gratifies the wish to labor and create--and by so doing, to rule over an imagined world of your own."

"Lots of moments in any week, many of them random and hilarious, please me--especially when people dear to me are present.  Yet, when they go well, each of the crafts I have attempted to master--writing, photography, and also psychotherapy--leaves me with a deep private sense of satisfaction.  I feel stimulated, warm, slighted elated, or otherwise moved; content; purposeful.  Though I don't think about it consciously, I sense I'm comfortably aligned with my ideal of myself...."

What is your absorbing errand on this day in late June, 2017?