Stepping off the Merry-Go-Round

For awhile there, I guess I thought, “if it needs to be said, then I need to say it”. But the time has to be right. I’ll know because it will come spilling out. Or maybe it’s the place—from a distance, like on paper or in the world we’ve come to know, online. I know that I am an introvert. I would know this without having taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) because, well, I know how I feel about things, and I know how things make me feel. I’ve just read that INfJs are the rarest MBTI personality type, making up only 1% to 3% of the U.S. population.

We are compassionate, relying on our strong sense of intuition and emotional understanding. We can be soft-spoken, but this does not mean that we are pushovers. We have deeply held beliefs and an ability to act decisively to get what we want. How many times have I heard, “Harold, why don’t you tell us what you really think.” Chuckle chuckle. Sometimes strong opinions just have to be given voice.

We can form strong, meaningful connections with other people. While we enjoy helping others, we always need time and space to recharge. Unlike extroverts who are energized by situations that require lots of interaction with others, introverts are depleted by these interactions. Typically for me, I just want to get home, close the door and be alone with my thoughts, and do only what I want to to do, which may be absolutely nothing. I had a house guest over the summer—a friend of almost 50 years—who visited three different times in the course of three weeks, a couple of days at a time. At the end of this visit, I was “worn to a nub,” as the expression goes, and resentful. Some part of me—an important part—still hasn’t recovered from these visits.

We are idealists, and we use our abilities to translate this idealism into action. I have to add here that while I haven’t slipped into the world of cynicism, I find it harder and harder to keep my head above water in the seas of meanness and dysfunction that have come to characterize our time. Even though I subscribe online to some of the best sources of writing and news reporting—New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic—I struggle to find things that I want to read.

We like to exert control of situations by planning, organizing, and making and acting upon decisions. And I’ll add that as leaders we encourage those who support the work we do to step up, voice their ideas, and take their own leadership roles. And to get credit for what they do.When making decisions, INFJs place a greater emphasis on their emotions rather than objective facts. And while we don’t see the world through rose-colored glasses, we understand that our world is filled with both good and bad, we hope to make it a better place. To borrow a well-used expression, we seek to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Push come to shove, when our resources feel depleted, we have to step off the merry-go-round. Over the years I have found this to be true more and more frequently. An article of the December 2017 issue of Smithsonian Magazine explores the famously misquoted words of Greta Garbo regarding alone time. “I never said, ‘I want to be alone,’” she explained, according to a 1955 piece in LIFE magazine. “I only said, ‘I want to be let alone! There is all the difference.”





From New Mexico Looking Back at Texas

So much has changed since I started this blog in 2007. For one thing, I’ve grown old, now staring at my 78th birthday on September 16. Back in 2007 I had just lost my mother, I had decided I wanted to try living at least part time in New Mexico, which to me of course meant Santa Fe, and I was one year shy of 65. I had been enamored of the capitol city since our family’s first and only true vacation. I’m uncertain of the year, either 1952 or ’53. I’ve written about that before on this blog, and I’m not going to rehash it here.

For the first few years of this blog, I had a lot to say about the things that had been brewing in me for my entire life. Family, people who have made their mark on me over decades, religion, social justice, history, the world of collecting of which my interests are a minuscule part, more. Photos were an important part of what I posted. Then somewhere around 2012 I lost my steam, so my time in blogosphere was reduced to pics and only brief comments, if I said anything at all. It didn’t take long for me to lose interest altogether. I’ve tried regenerating that over 10 years, posting a piece maybe two or three times each year, but I’ve lost the need to say something. I hate to think that I have drained the well. 

Well, crap, why am I now connecting that I had heart bypass surgery in November 2012, and one year before I had a stent. The spring of 2012 was the last time I exhibited at the Round Top Antiques Fair. I sent what remained of my collection of Texana to auction in July that year—two 26 foot van loads from my two-story barn home in Leon County Texas. That 200 acre place had become part of my family in 1973, and in 1999-2000 I had had about 2000 square feet of the barn that had been built in the early ‘60s converted to a living space. I created a native garden that had grown shovelful by shovelful over several years.

After sending off those two van loads of my collection, there was plenty of unrelated but very cool stuff still in the place. By 2013 my twice-annual trips to Texas were reduced to one. In the winter of 2017 I made another significant run at reducing the contents of my barn home. That summer I deeded the place to my middle sister. I had bought a home here in Albuquerque, which I love about as much as anyone can love a place. At times my heart still mourns giving away something that at its foundation was a gift to me from my mother, and in which I had invested so much spirit, talent, physical energy, and money. Reality dictated that I give up something, the hard lesson of resources.  I haven’t been back to Leon County since May of 2019. A friend here in Albuquerque who buys and sells carried me to Texas then, pulling a 20 foot cargo trailer behind his crew cab truck to bring back everything we could haul for a sale here in Albuquerque. It happened, a more than modest success, still falling short of an outright success. Action. Cut. To be continued.