Greatness in the face of mundanity...

I read somewhere today that Einstein used to sit in a chair with his keys in his hand and let his mind wander. His keys would eventually fall out of his hand and wake him from his reverie.

This sounds positively luxurious to me. To sit in a chair and have no one bother me long enough for my keys to fall from my completely relaxed hand -- how many of us have that opportunity?

From the moment I rise in the morning until I fall into bed at night, my time is taken up with mundane things, laundry and cooking chief among them. I often wonder what I might accomplish if I were freed from such things, if I knew that someone else would take on their responsibility. Certainly the education I pursued with such alacrity was intended for intellectual pursuits, not just the logistics of handling simultaneous homework supervision, music instruction, and dinner preparation at the end of each day.

Tillie Olsen drew attention to this problem in the lives of women. She lived it, and she wrote about it. She herself had to fit her writing into the interstices of her family and work life, not to mention her political activism. How much more might she have published if she had not had such demands on her time? Would she have traded her large family for more time for contemplation?

If Einstein had had to take care of daily housekeeping, would we now have a theory of relativity? I doubt it. When one's mind is filled with the minutiae of child-rearing and housekeeping, there isn't much room left for higher thought. It's hard to switch gears from the goal-oriented list-making concrete stuff of daily life to the process-oriented, loosy-goosey wafty contemplation necessary for great leaps in modern thought.

And how does one justify it? Someone looking at my life right now would see me as a housewife and mother, nothing more. The cleanliness of my house and the behavior of my children are the yardsticks by which my life is measured by others. My messy house might be vindicated by the publication of a novel or even an essay, but I must first find the time to write the damn thing. It seems I can only justify quiet, contemplative time to myself if I sacrifice sleep to do it, and that has repercussions that affect all of us, especially as I get older. If I take it any other time, I feel like I'm cheating, like my time would be better used in the service of my family, washing their clothes, cooking their meals, managing their lives. It feels selfish on so many levels.

But that isn't fair! Did Einstein feel selfish or guilty about sitting in a chair, letting his keys fall? Of course not! What does it take to get to the point where sitting and thinking doesn't feel like cheating? Does one have to publish a certain number of articles or novels to find that feeling? Or is it more innate than that? Is it, as I suspect, somewhat related to gender?

There is a classic Dilbert strip that begins with Alice the "brittle engineer" working at her desk, skipping lunch yet again because she has too much to do. She goes looking for Dilbert and finds him in the cafeteria with Wally and the other guys, eating lunch, and she blows up at them. "How can you sit here and eat lunch when there's so much to do?" she says (or something to that effect). "Um... we were hungry?" is the reply. That, my friend(s), is the nub of it right there.

When I was first married, my husband and I went about the usual task of divvying up the household chores. We moved into a fairly large house with a yard, and it was our first foray into homeownership -- even more so for my husband, who had lived only in apartments his whole life. It soon became clear that, regardless of our agreed-upon splits, my husband would do only as much as he felt able to do without giving up any of the activities he had done as a bachelor apartment-dweller. He felt no guilt about things that were left undone and could not for the life of him understand why I insisted on doing so much work around the house. Nothing got in the way of his afternoon nap, while I spent hours doing yard work. When I complained about all the work that had to be done, he would just tell me not to do it. Not that he would do it, mind you, just that I should leave it undone. This infuriated me.

Someone has to take responsibility for the day-to-day operation of life. That's the key word: responsibility. My husband knew that he could abdicate responsibility for the house because I was so gung-ho about it. This happened in my work life as well: my male colleagues, like Dilbert and company, would go off to lunch while my female colleague and I would work through lunch because we felt there was so much to do. Clearly, the women on the team felt an overdeveloped sense of responsibility for the work that had to be done, and the men took advantage of that, consciously or not. It's a recurring pattern in the world as I see it, and I wonder how much of it is nurture and how much is nature.

Do we teach boys that they don't have to take responsibility for their domestic environment? Or is it broader than that? Are boys somehow learning that someone else will cover for them? I wonder if this is something we're doing overtly, or unconsciously. Women don't get rewarded for this behavior (except perhaps with sisterhood and shared eye-rolling), so why do we keep doing it? It must have to do with biology: women are evolutionally (?) wired to keep family life humming along while the men go off and please themselves, going forth and multiplying, as it were. Is that too simplistic? Is it a sociological rather than biological phenomenon? I can't separate the two. Perhaps it's just a matter of seeing the big picture. Men just seem innately more capable of selfishness than women, speaking generally, anecdotally, and with absolutely no scientific facts to back it up.

In any event, it seems to me that accomplishing something great in the world of letters or science or just about anything contemplative requires some level of abdication of responsibility for everyday minutiae. If you're coordinating carpool while you're putting dinner on the table, answering homework questions in between, you're not coming up with profound ideas. Someone has to keep life running, but these days it is still an inordinate number of women doing it. We need to let it go, and men need to pick up the slack. That means equal senses of responsibility, which may require some evolution in both sexes.