I was sitting at my favorite Mexican place, where I have eaten hundreds of times, and he has hired somebody new, who is not quite as good as the other folks he normally uses. And I was sitting there, and it wasn’t bothering me. I was sitting there, remembering all the different conditions I had eaten there, with girlfriends, with my “Lonely Hearts Club”–all of us divorced–with my boss, and the many, many times I had eaten there hungover.
Usually I use food as a drug. Usually I gorge myself. And I was watching her move slowly, and I realized I wasn’t feeling anything. Not in a good way or bad way. There was neither eagerness nor irritation. It just was. Time was just present. And the food was good like always, but it was nourishment.
And I thought: flow requires a certain amount of stress. Loving your job requires needing a certain amount of stress. Athletic highs depend on the anxiety of the possibility of failure. Climbing to the top of your professional, if it proves rewarding, will often feel good precisely because failure was possible, and the anxiety of contemplating that failure was a driving force.
Because this is how I rolled today, I had lunch at Taco Bell. I sat opposite a Marine in his dress uniform. And I was thinking: what drives Marines, more than anything, is fear–fear of failure, fear of letting their comrades down. Men kill and die from this fear in every war any nation fights. This fear of not meeting expectations is the essence of their indoctrination in boot camp. It is followed, reasonably enough, with pride–the carrot–in being the best.
But I am at the rough edge of calm. Outwardly, it feels textured in a not particularly pleasant way, let us say a pine cone. But I can feel, or sense, or suspect intellectually, or something, that underneath it is something interesting. This is where the real water is, the real ocean.
That will do for now. I’m not sure how to say what I’m saying.