Pranks and Paying Attention

This is definitively not an April Fools’ Day post. I am, when it comes to April 1st, completely humorless. I tell my kids and Forrest that I will not engage in any pranks and they had better be careful if they pull one on me, for one simple reason. I don’t do things by half measures. And when it comes to pranks, you kinda sorta gotta do it by half measures. If you go all in, it’s just mean.

I’m not a half measure kind of mom. I’m intense. And when it comes to pranks on my kids, I very quickly learned that I should only ever be the victim and never the perpetrator. Because when a kid goes too far, that’s a lesson learned. When your mom goes too far, that’s a one-way ticket to the therapist.

I wish I could be a half measure person. I’m really not - both in the good ways and the bad ways. If I go out for a run, I have to hold myself back from sprinting. If I decide to eat ice cream, I eat until I feel sick. If I finish a blog post, I start the next one immediately. If I decide to rest on the couch, I become a total slug. You can never have too much of a good thing, right? Right?

I’m actually getting better at the balance as I age. At realizing when enough is enough, when the extra effort isn’t productive anymore, when the writing gets worse as my brain gets tired. I know where the relentlessness comes from - it’s insecurity, plain and simple. Have I done enough? Am I checking all of the boxes? Am I lazy? So many of the things I put my energy towards have to physical product. No “thing” I can point to when I’m done, to feel proud of. That’s probably why I don’t really struggle with doing too much when I garden. It’s easy to see what I’ve done and it’s easy to feel good about it when I stop.

Because that’s the heart of it, right? Whether or not I feel good about my work when I stop. Whether I feel productive “enough”, whatever that means. Whether I’m using my time appropriately or if there’s something better, more meaningful that I could be doing. Whether I’m properly using my “one wild and precious life” as poet Mary Oliver put it.

Except, that productivity not what the poem is about at all. I see that quote on posters, on websites, on instagram stories from influencers advocating for hustle culture and when I go back to the text of the poem? It’s about laying in the grass, feeling the wonder of the universe and doing nothing more consequential than watching a grasshopper, how to be “idle and blessed.” I can’t claim to speak for her, but it seems like Mary is choosing the nothing part of my all or nothing approach to productivity and, just like me, she’s pondering her choice.

The funny part to me is that Mary Oliver won a freaking Pulitzer Prize. She was prolific and successful. But her insights, her unique experience of the world and the ability to put it into words - those things required everything but productivity. There is no hustle in her words, just a sense of wandering and wondering. And because of - not in spite of, but because of that paying attention, she was able to write poems that help us all to look at the world around us.

And maybe go all in on slowing down.