The Middle Way

Lately my days have been filled with frustrating road blocks.  Things that should resolve themselves easily instead get bogged down in endless complication and delay.  Because of this I’ve been pretty stressed out.  So today while I was contemplating this it occurred to me that I shouldn’t allow days at a time to go by without any fun.  So, I’ve decided to try and add at least one fun thing into each of my days.

Sounds easy.  But what it means is that I have to first free my mind from the annoying things I’m trying to overcome and instead think up some small diversion that I can do in a short amount of time.  For instance, today I dragged out my camera, the Minolta 200mm f/4 macro lens and a bellows mount and started taking some macro shots of a dead preying mantis that I’ve had sitting on a house plant for a few months.

Now was this a terribly valuable use of my time?  No, not at all.  But it was fun and it got me thinking about what kind of a macro rig I’d like to set up.  The bellows device I was using had a bunch of problems associated with it.  It didn’t attach to my tripod very well and it was not rigid enough to avoid a lot of vibration.  But working around these issues was stimulating and fun.  And it made me think about something other than my problems.  It was a distraction and it lightened my mood brilliantly.

So, for the foreseeable future (meaning, until I get past my problems), I will be trying to add something fun to my days in order to stave off depression.  But in general, maybe I’ve hit on something worth pursuing.  I’ve never been someone who lived a balanced life.  My instincts have always been a sort of all or nothing strategy to most things in life.  Probably this was a matter of necessity caused by an almost pathological laziness that left me always forced into an eleventh hour, hail Mary effort to stave off disaster.

So maybe late in life I’ve discovered a miraculous unheard-of strategy; balance.

Tomorrow is a big family party.  But I think I’ll get up early and try to set up a focus bracket with the 90mm macro lens and some interesting macro subject.  I think I saw a dead spider down in the exercise area.  I think he might make an interesting target.  If not, I’ll find some still life thing; a feather or a coin or something.  And I’ll have some fun.

And that will leave Sunday to do some work.  I need to figure a few things out that have been stalled for a couple of weeks.  And then Monday and Tuesday are unavoidable hell.  I thought Tuesday would actually turn into a horrifying fiasco but blind luck stepped in and turned a horrifying nightmare into a merely tedious exercise in futility.  But just two days later and it will be Thanksgiving and that should be a wonderful way to recover.

Balance.  What did Siddhartha preach?  The Middle Way?