I wanted to say a few words about life's flow. That is, to step back from the actual choices I make and look just at the series of actions as if it were a fluid, pressuring me to do things at certain times in certain ways, just because that's where the flow is going. I think it happens a lot. I'll offer a couple of examples, but I'm sure there could be more.

Some people listen to music as background noise at home. I tend to listen to television. Sometimes it's a regular drama, but frequently it's C-SPAN or MSNBC or CNN. I like it because it fills the little spaces of my time with extra information. I feel less like life is passing me by because I am continuously informed.

There's a lot of repetition. Some people think that's bad. But it allows one to not be always focused. In fact, you can notice when there's something actually happening in the world by sensing a change in the repetition. So a lot of the time I find it quite calming.

But sometimes I feel like it takes over in a bad way. It isn't the noise, oddly, but the structure. When watching network television, life becomes divided into one hour chunks and subdivided into secondary chunks† by commercial breaks. And although these secondary pieces are longer than seconds, they often remind me of the space between the ticks of a metronome, establishing a kind of pace to the day.

On the days I don't like it, I think it's because I become conscious of the fact that the rhythm it is imposing on my day is incompatible with how I wanted to pace myself. I find myself coming up for air at times not especially of my choosing, not related to my train of thought, merely because a show timed out when it did. Maybe that's why I so often like to tune to C-SPAN. At least the chunking of time that it does is more irregular. But the effect happens even there.

So, now and then, I take control of things and just turn off the TV and allow myself to get immersed in thoughts that run to their own natural completion. It's important to feel like one has a sense of control of one's life, but it's also important to make a space for things to happen that would not happen if one tried to box them into the spaces that are created just by the boxiness of routine.

I also wanted to say something about flow on a larger scale.

I was raised in a time when people were taught to save things. Coins, stamps, memorabilia. It's hardly a surprise to me that there are TV shows like Hoarders. The featured people are extreme cases, but the notion of hoarding is something many people with more modest hoarding impulses can relate to.

People of my generation collect things because they think they might be useful. We crossed a line at some point in modern society where we no longer fix things, we get new ones. Throwing things away so often has been terrible for the environment and we should surely change the practice. But for now the result is that people who save things for possible future use are considered dinosaurs or freaks. We live in a disposable society, but it's not even good for us.

But the reason I mention collecting today is not to talk about the environment. I'll come back to that another day. For today my interest in it is the administrative aspect. We save things often because they mean something to us personally. (See my poem The URLs of the Mind for a discussion of this.) But then we die and someone who often knows little or nothing about those things is charged with disposing of them. So the things get swept into a garbage bin or sent off to auction. Sometimes they're inherited by family who have no use for the items but can't bear to get rid of them. And they get hoarded again.

We do this because it's the flow of things we're used to. We don't stop to consider we have other ways to do things. Just as shutting of the TV is a choice, so too is the decision to do things differently.

When I turned 40, I remember thinking it was a big life event and that I should do something. I devised a concept of something to do but then didn't do it. The moment passed. Perhaps in the future I'll get the energy to do it. But I thought for now I would share the thought.

The first and most obvious observation is that it's too bad we have memorial services posthumously. We shouldn't wait for people to die to tell them how great we think they are. We should do it while they're alive.

But also, we collect stuff a long time, accumulating baggage whose purpose will be to hand down. In some ways, we go through many lives in a lifetime. There are intervals of time spent with a person, with a job or with a home that come to an end and then one puts the artifacts aside in the basement. It's hard to give them up. So we should have ritual activities that help to enable that. People should be encouraged to clean house, both literally and figuratively, so they are free to move on to something new.

I think some sort of every twenty years milestone event, not just a coming out party when you're becoming an adult and a retirement party, but a chance to stop and regroup event at intervals, might help shake out some cobwebs and give people a chance to reflect on where to go next in their life, while there's still time to do so.

But we take so much on autopilot. And I'm not sure the autopilot is tuned in a very practical way. We have more control than that of our lives, if we choose to use it.