Forewarning: This is going to be a great many pictures without much commentary, because I do not have much to add. This was by far one of the most beautiful places I visited in Turkey.
Entrance to the Tomb:
The city of Konya, our next stop, is currently the sixth largest city in Turkey. A city in this location has been here since the time of the Hittites; Phrygians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines all knew this city, which from the Greek to Roman Era was known as Iconium. The Apostle Paul and Silas traveled here during one of their missionary journeys. The city fell to the Seljuk Turks in A.D. 180 after the Battle of Manzikert in A.D. 1071 opened the Anatolian plateau to them.
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Sometimes, the unexpected happens.
One of the plans in the The Great Relocation 2.0 was that The Ravishing Mrs. TB, when she relocated here, would be going from full time to part-time work. This had been discussed much earlier in the year and had been agreed to by her employer. Her employer had been low-key advertising for a replacement. As you might remember in November, she had officially let them know that her last full time day would be on or about 31 December 2024.
This past week, she was notified that in fact she would not be needed part-time. They are outsourcing the entire job (at some point; this is still being worked out - which in itself tells me this was a bit of a last minute decision).
She has been in this position for over 10 years, so this surprises me a bit that they are doing this at the last minute. And sadly for her, instead of a rousing sendoff I fear she will simply slip away after her last day without fanfare - to my mind a somewhat poor ending to a 10 year relationship.
I am not going to say this throws the whole world into disarray - it does not; I had started planning a bit for this about three weeks ago when she mentioned she had overheard a conversation that this might be a possibility. Still, a possibility is one thing: actually coming to the time when the thing is supposed to happen and it does not is entirely something else.
For various and sundry reasons, it will likely be a bit before she can take a job here in New Home 2.0: A relocation drive, followed by a period of time away (pre-paid of course, so the money is non-refundable) and having time available to help her mother with some aspects of life following her father's death, will push things out a bit. And while it might be a squeaker for a bit, we should be okay - we had been economizing anyway and this will just drive that process even more.
On a larger scale, it does make wonder how much of this happening everywhere (as you might recall, Hammerfall 3.0 happened during this month as well): places getting to the end of the year and realizing that they have to economize, which in turn means impacting others.
In so many ways, it seems like our lives are being dramatically upended as a result of this move with a finality that I had not truly anticipated.
As I have often noted before, the best way to have God answer a prayer is to pray one that you really do not want Him to answer.
As I have been pondering things to work on in the coming year, one of the things I have failed to incorporate in years past is working on a virtue - I can make any sort of amount of plans for other things, but virtues like love, joy, peace patience, kindness, goodness, self control - those sorts of things from 1 Peter - have always somehow escaped my notice. That is probably intentional on my part: who wants to seriously work on "patience" in a world where the perception is often if you do not do it, no-one will?
At any rate, the thing that came to my mind for next year was humility. It is something I very much struggle with, being very much about myself and thinking about myself in almost every situation first and foremost. I may have tentatively - tentatively, mind you - reached out in prayer maybe mentioning it was something I needed.
The response, like most of the things that God really wants to do in my life, came almost immediately.
We recently had a new employee join my department at work. I say "New"; in point of fact they have far more experience than I do in the company and had just left about two years ago to take a new position. The individual is deeply experienced and genuinely seems to be a good person.
What surprised me - in meetings, in conversation, even in just listening to other conversations - is how threatened I feel.
Threatened? Ridiculous for someone that has been here less than a month. But there I am, my internal dander up. I was even a bit of a naysayer at some suggestions in meetings, until I replayed it in my mind and realized how petty it seemed and sounded and looked.
Why am I threatened? If I am truly honest to myself, it is because I am more concerned about my perceived position at the job and future opportunities than I am about realizing we have another resource to help, one with a lot of experience in the very systems we are trying to improve.
How very Junior High of me.
Humility - in this case - would neither think specifically of the future of my own work or career in this case. It would be not only to be welcoming, but encouraging of other ideas and projects that move things forward, even if in the process my own position (real or imagined) is eclipsed.
And then, I play this idea out into every relationship that I am involved in and realize it is going to be a very, very long year indeed.
At least, perhaps as Isaac the Syrian suggests, I can be at rest.
Of all the social mediums that are out there, the one I tend to follow the most is InstaPic (Instagram, to those who may know it otherwise).
I like the format because is lends itself mostly to pictures and minimal text; posting lengthy diatribes about the world and its woes or how certain people with certain beliefs of any stripe are <fill in the blank> almost never appear. It is also the one that my children are most likely to post on; if I want to see (in something like real time) what is going on in their lives, InstaPic is where it will be posted.
(As an aside, The Book of Face lends itself to opinions and diatribes, and inevitably when I am there I find out more about people than I care to. Also via feedback, every political season now becomes a version of The Great Unfriending for a lot of folk. I find the less I inquire into some things, the better I get along with people.)
Were you to see my InstaPic feed, I fear it would be an unremarkable thing, a feed filled with rabbits (real and art), cats and dogs and ducks, Roman and Viking re-enactors, hiking memes, and quotes from Rumi and the Orthodox church fathers. InstaPic also insists on putting in "Things we think you like because of other things", which ranges from the slightly interesting to the somewhat aggravating.
And ads. Lots and lots of ads for games, clever things that I need to buy, and apparently mental health services and apps for older men (go figure).
However, it was only recently that I was struck by the fact that a great deal of the content is essentially a repeat of itself.
Part of that is simply the idea of "retweeting" (from back in the days of Twitter): a clever or cute or thoughtful thing that one drops into one's own feed and then gets propagated from there. That is pretty benign (and how I find a lot of things, honestly). But the other part - the slightly concerning part - is simply taking something and redoing it.
There are two versions of this.
In the first version, one takes a quote that one finds amusing or clever and simply reuses it, putting a different background or picture in it. In the other, one does not actually "create" anything, but simply reacts to smaller snippets of other pictures or videos. In the beginning, both of these were only slightly bothersome. Now, they make me actively annoyed. Why? Because it represents a real loss of creativity and a certain form of intellectual laziness.
I am as much for taking a good idea and running with it as the next person. And in some sense, imitation is the higher form of flattery. But what this becomes instead is merely a grasp for more "views" (ah, that great trap of the modern era, attention). It was maybe funny or amusing the first time, and maybe the four or five times after that, but after a while it is simply boring: endless retakes on the same phrase or set piece, endless small movies of pets inserted "reacting" to the situation.
I know. This is very much a First World problem, and a curmudgeonly complaint about it. But it strikes a chord in me, I suppose because I greatly believe in the creative process. But this is not the creative process, no matter how "different" people feel their take on it is. It really just reflects what much of modern entertainment has become: rather than try something new, just recycle the things that worked in the past in hopes they will work again.
Sigh. At this rate there will be nothing in my feed and I will be reduced to sending pictures via my phone to my family and hoping I get some in return. How truly 2006 of me.
29 September 20XX+1
My Dear Lucilius:
Sometimes to amuse myself, I go back and read my writings to you. It is a good practice of course, this reading of what one has written in the past (instead of just writing and moving on). Given the circumstances, it sometimes gives me a good chuckle.
Last year at more or less this time, I was still fuming over the force majeure that took my truck from me. It surprises me that it has been that long and yet not that long at all.
Time, it seems, has a way of getting away from us.
In re-reading that entry, it made me realize that at the end of this year, my calendar runs out – oh, if I wanted to start up one of my electronic devices I suppose I could get an orientation of things, but in terms of practical analogue paper calendars, the backup to the main calendar – that one they so often insist on printing in smaller print at the end of the annual calendar – runs out.
I am trying to decide how much I care.
Oh, I can certainly “re-figure” the calendar for next year and probably will do so, just to relieve any sense of “missing a day” anxiety that seems to infect me so much. But even with a figured calendar, how much will that really matter?
This situation finds itself a bit like what I suspect retirement used to be like in a way: there is a sense of days passing but the weeks and months begin to blend together. When I write you these missives, I put a date on the top because that is what I was trained to do. I never include the day, because back when I was working we never included days for things like dates. Days were for scheduling meetings and tasks and activities and vacations. Remove the importance of named days as indicators of where we fall in the week or month, and suddenly events just seem to run along at their own pace.
Now, the days do not matter so much. The seasons matter, the temperatures matter – when I can plant and harvest and when I need to ensure the most wood is available, those things matter. When certain things are in season – that mattered before for things like berry picking; it matters even more now when berries are not just delightful side dishes but possibly (fortunately, not yet) the whole meal. And what day it is has absolutely no impact on how much daylight we have to productively use (too far little as we move closer to Winter).
As I think on this, I begin to see how things like Solstices and Equinox were important, how religious feasts and festivals helped to mark time, and why years were often known in terms of the Archons or Counsels or Emperors. In a world where the days were marked as either feast days or holy days, market days or days of owed service, did it matter whether it was Tuesday or Thursday?
It is not so much that time keeps slipping into the future, as the song of our youth suggested. It is that time is simply slipping into the reality of the now and needs of the future – measured not so much by individual days but by seasons and periods.
If this sort of free flow of time is what retirement would have been like, I am sorry that I missed the opportunity to truly engage in it.
Your Obedient Servant, Seneca
On our drive to Konya, our guide made a stop for us to look at a marble quarry. It is the first time I had ever seen one in either Turkey or Greece, although there is a lot of marble in both places (Interesting fact: Turkey is the world's largest exporter of marble).
Coming off of a rather pleasant holiday and dropping right into the last month of the year, I have to admit that I have wildly underestimated how disruptive this entire year has been. Part of that was expected of course - a combination of the death of one's final surviving parent and an in-law, a new job, a relocation of one's living circumstances as well as one's life, and an unanticipated effective long term living apart from one's family can do that.
Part of it is simply beyond any of those direct causes, a combination of reaching the point that like it or not, options begin closing down.
I am lucky in this, as I have had friends that blog write about reaching similar circumstances in their life - mostly as it turns out, by circumstances beyond their control as well. It is a comfort to me in this period, one I had not realized that I really needed until the thought occurred to me that others have gone on this path before me. They have survived and arguably - at least what they admit to publicly - have thrived in such circumstances. Once again, The Social Internet for the win.
Impacting my thoughts as well is the realization that not only am I getting older - my ability to say I am in my mid-50's is more of an ideal than a fact at this point - but that with the deaths of unexpected terminal illnesses that have come into my life this year combined with some simple math based on anticipated life span, the reality of time left on the clock at best is far less than what is already under the belt.
Or said in the inevitable sports analogy, we are not quite into the last period, but the clock is darn well near there.
Which makes one - if one is honest - have to ask the hard questions.
I am someone who always feels as if I have to be doing something or involved in some thing or area of study. And if I am honest, my study is such that I am the equivalent of an intellectual and interest jackdaw, stripping shiny bits of information and knowledge from everywhere as treasures.
But all of this takes time of course, time which is relentlessly and bearing on like a freight train towards a destination we all know but we hesitate to speak out loud.
There are some other realities, of course. Finance is one of the largest ones at this point. There is a better than even odd that at some point next year The Ravishing Mrs. TB will find herself out of the part-time remnants of her job. And while I have every reason to believe that my job is stable and secure, there is also the reality that the last few years have reached that inevitable point that seems to happen to many where their salary is in the decline, not on the incline. I do not bemoan the fact - we had many good years and we are still doing fine. But it does introduce a level of cost management, especially in an economy where - no matter whom is in charge - inflation is a reality for the current day and likely future.
All of this to say that the disruption of this year, combined with mortality and economic realities, means that I will have to start making some choices about the future that are in some meaningful sense irrevocable.
I say "irrevocable". That sounds a bit dramatic (and to be fair, I tend to think my life should be dramatic in all things) and probably is not so. But in a real sense, at least for me, making this sorts of decisions are. Partially because of the fact that a decision made means a path not taken; partially because by making the decision, I have bound myself to a path for good or ill.
As I write this, the sun has broken through the clouds a bit and casts a sort of soft light through the trailing edges of holes of blue sky. A cup of coffee - the pecan blend that I love so much and of which I received a delivery as part of The Ravishing Mrs. TB's visit - smoulders in the cup beside me. Behind me in the alternate bedroom of the apartment which has become the default rabbit room and semi-office space, J the rabbit works quietly away at cleaning herself.
It is at times like this that I am reminded that - even in the midst of decisions which I sense in some way will determine the direction of my life for years to come - there remains the small pleasures of life that defy cost and time and simply present themselves in any circumstance, no matter what is going on in the larger world.
Or as Lady Julian of Norwich said, All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.
