Fewer Choices, More Order

I remember the how, back when I had a job, my world was largely organized by external forces. I drove to Orange on Monday to meet with a hospital group, went to the UCLA campus on Tuesday and Thursday to teach a class, attended a Bar Association meeting on Wednesday night, and so on. All events that were largely a function of others’ needs, availability or arrangements. I had a day planner; I looked at it all the time. Then, I would be off for a two-week vacation and when I came back, I couldn’t exactly remember how to do my job until the day planner told me what to do.

In retirement, the external world does very little to arrange your days (other than, say, raining when you were hoping to garden). In fact, the single most important skill of retirement may be in learning how to organize your day yourself. Even when you’ve learned to do it, however, something comes along now and then from the external world that interrupts that organization, something like family visits. After a while, the visitors leave and, although you never got the hang of a new schedule when they were here, you have now lost the old one as well. And unlike the days when you could look at that day planner and get it back, there is no longer anything to look at in order to inform one’s self about what you are supposed to be doing. Oh, the dishes always need to be done, there’s always some laundry and ironing and watering of plants, but I’m talking about a more purpose-driven sense of one’s day, one's life.

Quilting offers me my best hope, but even that doesn’t exactly work for me at the moment. Because much of the quilting that I do is of the ‘art quilt’ variety, I can't seem to just slide into it easily once I've put it aside for awhile. You can't just wait for inspiration, of course (that could be a long time coming), but you have to have some kind of starting place and I’m not finding it. So, today, I went backwards to the tradition of quilting, to lots of labor-intensive cutting of strips and squares and making of blocks, all of which will result in some version of a traditional quilt based upon one of the two basic quilting designs (the nine-patch and the log cabin: for this quilt, it's the nine-patch).


I have narrowed the task by limiting myself pretty much to two colors (different values of orange and of blue-green) and to two basic forms of 9-patch (a 5-4 checkerboard and a cross), and a symmetric arrangement of the blocks. That means the initial constraints of construction are considerable, although the arrangement of blocks has a lot of possibilities.

In the photo, there are about 100 five-inch square blocks, but nothing is sewn together or even in a final arrangement. I may move each piece somewhere else this evening or tomorrow morning to see whether some other arrangement is more appealing, thereby creating some different quilt. The cutting, the sewing, the ironing are all occupying my time and energy very nicely at the moment, filling my day and, because of the constraints, not leaving me with too many choices.

That’s the problem with having your day planner empty: the choices with which you could fill it when you have no schedule appear to be unlimited. Less choice, less choice: that is what we need. What more un-American sentence could there be?