A Vacation Every Day

This? I recently posted this to Instagram and Facebook. Unfortunately, not only is it hideously grammatically incorrect (and I was too tired to make a new version), it’s all wrong. You don’t “find” a vacation every day. You create it.

(Sorry if anyone assumed the title referred to living in Hawaii. Living in Hawaii in no way makes life a vacation every day. Get that idea out of your head right now.)

Thanks to some insight from a savvy cousin, I resolved in December to make 2019 my Year of Contentment. I have never been content; there’s always been something ahead, something to anticipate, to drive myself to reach. I have never given myself permission to be content. I’ve been afraid to let myself settle in, afraid I might miss out on something, fail to achieve something, even when I thought I was being “lazy.” “Lazy” is just me uncertain of the next goal, frustrated because I don’t know how to get to reach a goal, frightened I’ll fail and so unable to begin. I fall into a lot of time-wasting nonsense to escape the horror of that wobbly stasis, that paralysis.

Another astute friend recently compared her life with its normal (but in no way minor) course corrections to a cruise ship, and mine to a speedboat. It’s true… my life has been a constant slalom with occasional slow grinds back to the mountaintop on a creaky lift, whether reactive or proactive. This mad dash is not something my therapists have noted or helped me address – and it needs to be addressed – which only proves that the people who know you best are your best support system.

However, since recognizing these things about myself, I’ve also noticed something good: I already find – no, create – a vacation every day. I always have.

I’ve spent the last few weeks under intense physiological stress, partly self-induced because I’m Type A and have no chill, partly the natural result of a new environment and the universal pressure of a new job, new routine, new relationships to navigate. But in those three weeks I have also realized that despite the constant self-induced frenzy and the very real mental health seesaw, I am naturally a happy, optimistic person who frequently lives in the moment.

The pace at the new job can be frantic due to operational timing. The process runs on a tight schedule, one-hundred and eighty minutes here, forty-one minutes there, thirty-eight minutes to the next required action, with the potential for things to go wrong if a target is missed. When I arrive at work I check the timing and set multiple alarms on the phone I’m not supposed to carry in my pocket. (The supervisor knows and doesn’t care as long as I’m not playing games or cruising Facebook, and really, I don’t freaking have time.)

It’s a constant, repeated hustle through critical manual tasks so you can be back in front of the computer to confirm a prompt so the process can go on, and what you do affects your fellow operator’s timeline, so it’s not just the process you’re responsible to. (Operations here are narrowed down to a tag-team crew; a third “warm body” can help, depending on the person, but isn’t necessary to operations. That dude or dudette has other important tasks at which to bust his or her ass.)

Despite this, when I review the past three weeks, there is a series of vivid snapshots among the flotsam of achievement and error, frustration and pride, moments of levity or peace or wonder: a sweet, quiet fellow operator giggling as he scrapes the soft frost off a pipe through which a gas is moving so quickly its temperature is plummeting, making it “snow” on me through the grate of the platform above; my supervisor cranking Pandora’s reggae channel as we develop an easy, telepathic, meditative rhythm to a messy, complicated task, just the two of us; the beauty of the living liquid colors and shapes acetone makes as I dribble it through the holes in a steel sieve plate and the trapped, heat-gummed algae oil dissolves into the sink; pausing to squint into the surprise flashes of light from a giant wet paddle spinning slowly in a circulation pond several yards from the open back door at a certain time of day. It snaps my attention to the profound, endless pace of the sun’s slow trajectory in the blue Hawaiian sky.

There are so many more. I notice these things; I am an observer, even of myself, my own life. These moments are my vacations every day, created out of the fabric of life. For some reason I am tearing up as I write this. I wouldn’t say I suffer from introspection, but I sure do a lot of it. How else can I solve the puzzle of myself, learn myself? Find contentment?

I forget this: I love manual labor. I love heavy lifting, cranking stuck bolts with a ratchet, feeling gas or liquid flow through a valve under my hand. I love washing gunk off metal, the smell of heated Simple Green in an ultrasonic cleaner. I love my shoulders aching after holding a drill with a mixer attachment at an impossible angle at eye level, stirring frozen oil in a steel vat with scalding water moving through its hollow shell; if I rest my arms on the edge of the vat to relieve the ache, the heated metal stings to remind. I love climbing stair ladders with jagged tread to prevent slipping, hands squeaking on smooth pipe railing, hauling my weight up with my arms to get there faster, navigating a metal jungle.

I never forget that I love industrial environments. I love the sight of tangled pipes, complex valves that look like alien spacecraft, rollup doors and forklifts and barrels and totes of chemicals, all the things to discover and learn. I love the sounds of the plant: electrical humming, valves shrieking, one in particular giving a constant, mournful, breathy hoot as it automatically modulates the flow of a substance pressurized and heated to a level so high it’s no longer a liquid or gas, but something mysterious between the two, scientifically dubbed “supercritical.”

I love the science, the physics, the design that creates a beautiful, fine-tuned system from out of the chaos of the universe, governing molecules, the ultimate (granted, not-always-a-good-thing) human achievement: bending nature to will. I love the programming that allows a logic controller – a little box full of wires and circuit boards – to talk to strategically-placed sensors and direct a symphony of pneumatic actions that replace what human hands once had to do, making the impossible possible. I love the problem solving and the problems solved. I value the engineering of a plant but I love fixing what the designers forgot or miscalculated, making it my own, mastering it. Engineers do not own their creations; the people who build and operate them do.

I am an artist, but I often forget that art is not just classic creation. There is an aspect of art to everything we do, to living. I don’t just paint and write and craft; I am an industrial artist. I use tools and machines, the designs of others, to create a desired result. I don’t build musical instruments, I don’t make paint, but I make music and I create images. There is satisfaction in both.

I also no longer believe in the theory of left brain vs. right brain, or maybe I am simply someone in whom the power of neither side is more prominent. I baffle Facebook quizzes. (Working theory: women are not generally ‘left- or right-brained” because the mass of nerves that tie the two hemispheres of our brains together – the corpus callosum – are much larger than men’s. This makes us more capable of managing multiple conflicting tasks that require an equal, possibly more taxing contribution from both sides of the brain.) It takes an innate mathematician to create an artistic composition. It takes a musician to appreciate the symphony of industrial processes. It takes creativity to build or improve a system or to adjust to the variables of a process, to manage the sensitive ballet of operational tasks shared between operators.

A third wise and lovely person in my life theorized – via an app called Marco Polo, where you record a video message to each other to be watched and responded to in your own time, and it is weirdly wonderful, and I am not getting paid for this promo – that we are still true creatives despite the fact that neither of us seems to be able to manage to master the process of making a living off our own creations. I can accept that. I can accept that there is no shame in making a living from mastering others’ creations. I still create my own art; I am more likely to make things I love on my own time if I’m also doing something stable that requires creativity.

People who know me well worry that once mastered, this process I’m getting paid to operate will bore me, that once the learning is done there will be no creativity and I’ll stagnate and become restless again. I’m beginning to suspect though that the contentment I crave may come from a situation where I learn to create (again, “find” is the wrong word) or notice that I already create a vacation every day in the midst of repetition and competence at something, learning to create enjoyment in the everyday grind of “going to work,” forsaking the freedom I’ve always thought would bring me contentment. That freedom never truly happened for my father, who spent his unfairly short life chasing dreams, although like me I think he lived with many moments of contentment. He was also an optimist and far less introspective than I am. Creative self-employment may consist of doing the thing you love, but it also consists of doing things you hate as much as you hate conventional employment and clipped time-wings. You're tied to those tasks as much as you are to an outside employer.

So. Contented employment. The situation has to be relatively right, and I reserve the right to insist on minimum requirements.

I have to like the people I work with; I think I will, even the Difficult Personality, now that I’m freed from his tyranny by my own bravery and competence, and a different shift. I've had several jobs where my fellow employees were the ones who made me miserable; but I've had one job where my fellow employees were like family. It may have been lightning in a bottle, that place at that time, but at least I know it's possible. And I've learned to professionally, calmly confront the problem (or people) head on, with positive results.

I have to feel appreciated; I already do… they’ve had tremendous turnover due to the unfortunately limited and flaky nature of the Hawaiian workforce and personalities that just didn’t fit or weren’t cut out for this kind of work.

I have to master the process so I don’t fall victim to my own vicious impostor syndrome; I already have for the most part, in just three weeks, an achievement that takes most people a few months and some never do. (Again, in point of fact: I am the only woman among nine operators. I also had a lot of related experience, and have a knack for it. I am "mechanically inclined.")

I have to like the environment; it’s hot, and we all sweat, but the views! I can see waves crashing on the shore from the “lanai,” which is what the boys call the covered concrete pad in front of the building, where we vacuum the spent material out of steel cylinders. The vacuum kicks off frequently to allow the material to settle and prevent clogging, a forced pause when I can glance over the shocking black folds of pahoehoe lava across the road to see the violent white spray on the rocks. I will never become nonchalant about living on lava, on fresh bits of the world. I also like the two huge rolling fans that dispel equipment-harming humidity and blow away any escaped vented carbon dioxide.

There’s room for improvement, but I feel like even if I can’t move those mountains, I’ll still be okay. I don’t have to look forward to going to work, but for once in my life I can’t dread it all the time, and that’s partly an internal adjustment. I think everyone dreads their job sometimes for various reasons, but I mean consistently... I’ve had jobs that made me miserable for over a year to the extent that I became ill. So far – and yeah, it’s early yet – I don’t dread it, even when one person was making it miserable. I did, and will always, dread the 5AM alarm. I am NOT a morning person, despite the glory of sunrise, which is why I’m excited about swing shift. And very few people are around after 5PM, which is nice.

So! The Year of Contentment is starting off well, this grand experiment in acceptance and observation and giving myself permission to rest. I am nothing if not open to exploring. I understand that constant happiness is not realistic, or really desirable. I’m just looking for serenity and as much stability as can be expected in a world where true stability doesn’t exist.

I’m looking for ways to create a vacation every day.