I don’t mean for this title to put you off. Lately, in my quarantine journey I find that I have too much time for grokking. Truthfully, it might not be too much time; it might just be that grokking takes a lot out of a person.
So, what is grokking? To grok something is to consider something from every angle. It is to love and hate something; it is to completely understand it. It means that you withhold judgement on an idea, person, or action until sufficient time has passed and all possible information has come in. The word comes from the book Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein which is where I became familiar with it, “to grok” as a concept has been adapted by the computer programmers and counterculture and is included in the Oxford English dictionary.
[The husband and I listened to the audiobook for it this past winter because he remembered it as one of his favorites from his teenage years. After listening to it, me for the first time, and him again, we had a similar conclusion. Firstly, we both thought that the book felt like a book written during the time it was written, which was 1962. Specifically what I mean is that everything that happened seemed very deliberate in that there was no subtly to anything that happened or was said. Some of the things that happened in the book were, to borrow a term from the television show Community, “crazytown-banana pants”. However, some of the concepts that were expressed in the book such as the idea of Grokking things and waiting until a subject is completely considered before making a decision, seem downright brilliant.]
Sorry, about the etymology lesson. I very nearly called this post something else to avoid going down this rabbit hole, but I feel grokking best describes what I have been doing.
Essentially, what has been going on with me is this: First, I am not unhappy. I am an introvert so some aspects of this lockdown appeal to me. I have more time for reading and running, both of which I like to do. The weather has been improving so I like that we have fewer commitments and can devote more of our time to being outside. The weather outside this weekend was beautiful and we enjoyed it by going to a park yesterday and enjoying our yard today. We have small children who are on sort of bedtime schedule so on most weekend nights, my husband and I stay at home with them. I used to get jealous of all the people I would see on social media who were out doing interesting things on weekends, but now everyone is like me, staying home.
In some ways, the fact that everyone is staying home like me, is nice. It seems like people are baking bread, working on their sour dough starters, crafting, playing outside, and making things. We are growing our home-skills. We are becoming more competent without the distractions of youth sports, going to movie theaters and hanging out at Target.
It feels like we are all in the same boat, even if it is all just an illusion, as everyone still has their own unique situation with some of laid off and some of us not.
Yet, the flip side of being in the same boat is that when I talk to my friends and family it seems like there is never anything new to say. We are all doing the same stuff so we can commiserate and share our new baking adventures but there isn’t any new information to share outside of that. Also, all this pent up-ness is making people a little cranky and tense, which is to be expected and is certainly understood. I am not judging. For me, the novelty of everyone being able to share the experience of staying home every weekend, aka: Baby Jail, has worn off. I am sorry I ever wished for it.
I feel kind of stuck, in that there are things that I could be doing, but there is no catalyst for me to do them. For example, right now I am sitting in my living room looking at a birthday sign that has been hanging up since late February and I don’t have the ambition to get out a chair and take it down and put it away. I think if these were normal times, I would have put it away by mid-March, but right now the hubs and I live in the mindset of “nothing matters right now”.
So what am I doing instead of taking down the birthday sign?
Lots of thinking!!! So much time for thinking!!!
In the morning, while I drink my coffee, I have time to read and think (and ignore my children as they play around me). We have fewer plans in the morning than we used to and there isn’t always an impetus for us to have breakfast right away and get out the door, so we tend to linger longer.
What do I think about? Well, for some reason I think a lot about who I was between the ages of 20-24 years old. I think it is because a lot has happened in the past 20 years and maybe I haven’t had time to digest it all. Maybe it is because when I moved to Frost Valley YMCA, NY when I was 23 years old that is when I said goodbye to my childhood and now that I have children, I grok it for useful insights on how to parent or how to transition to a grownup. Maybe I just grok to grok.
I used to believe it was unhealthy to consider your past too much because it could cause you to live in the past instead of the present. But since listening to Stranger in a Strange Land, I have reconsidered the idea of thinking about the past. I think there is richness to be gained by thinking about the past.
How have you been filling your days?
