I am a lot like Otis Redding. Except that I don’t sing R&B professionally. And I’m white. And not dead. Ok, I’m going to start over now.
I’ve had a bit of sitting-on-a-dock experience lately. I would even dare to call myself an expert, mostly because it is not a skill that takes a lot of time to master. There is the “sitting” part which most people have mastered before they’ve mastered, say, eating solid foods. Then there is the “on a dock” part which isn’t so much a skill as access to a dock. There is not a lot of dock-sitting, for example, in Antarctica.
But there is one last unstated part of dock-sitting, the “overthinking about something” part, of which I am the undisputed lightweight—okay, yeah more like middleweight—champion of the world. That is where my sitting-on-a-dock game really shines.
For summer vacation this year we rented a lakeside cabin in upstate New York. The cabin of course had a dock and that dock got a lot of use what with us jumping off of it and launching canoes from it. The canoe-launching aspect of it tapered off substantially, though, once we realized the work-to-fun ratio of getting an unwieldy metal canoe into the water and back out again leaned substantially towards the “work” end of things. That’s when my daughters and I discovered the joys of just sitting on the dock and dangling our feet in the water to cool off as we read books and wasted time.
Just like that Otis Redding song.
Or at least the bits of it that my vacation brain remembered. And mostly it remembered him singing about wasting time…but in a way that expanded the syllable count of that two-word phrase from the traditionally-agreed-upon three to roughly forty-two.
Sitting on that dock, soaking up that summer sun was gloriously relaxing. Which is exactly when the overthinking kicks in. Is there something else I should be doing to enjoy this more? How does my dock-sitting experience measure up to Otis Redding’s? What is the proper wasting-time efficiency metric and am I meeting that? No, I’m not the guy you take on vacation when you want a fun time.
Most people, dappled in sunshine and feet dangling in the water, do not concern themselves with how their leisure time measures up to an R&B song released in 1968. And especially one that was never intended to be a musical instruction manual on how to while away your time.
I know what you’re thinking—“Paul, how did you do compared to Otis Redding?” I’m glad you asked. Or I should say—since I know none of you actually asked—I’m glad that I imagined there is someone just as hung up on overthinking things as me who somehow found this post and asked. If you’re going to overthink things, at least be imaginative about it, amiright?
So how did I do? Let’s take this line-by-line.
Sittin’ in the mornin’ sun
Or, in my case, mid-afternoon sun. “Morning sun” undoubtedly has a certain je ne se quoi to it but it also means you have to get out of bed in the actual morning instead of sleeping late, as God intended. Then you’d also have to get dressed and come up with plan for breakfast. And by “plan” I of course mean contemplating numerous healthy options before eating my daughters’ donuts instead since I’m the one who got up early and, well, finders’ keepers and all that. I’m going to say this point goes to me because I got to sleep late. Unless some music historian finds out that Otis had donuts with him the morning he was sitting on his dock. Then he’d win because, well, donuts.
I’ll be sittin’ when the evenin’ comes
I did not sit on our dock until evening. Because mosquitoes. So Otis gets this point and I got a night of not having to itch myself raw. Win-win.
Watching the ships roll in
Or, in my case, a powerboat whipping around a water-skier. Repeatedly and with much gusto, which…isn’t anywhere near as poetic. So another point to Otis.
Then I watch ’em roll away again, yeah
Again, powerboats. There’s no gentle rolling away with a powerboat. Only the high-pitched whining of way more engine than is needed to haul a two-hundred-pound, middle-aged man across a lake that is only slightly larger than your average mall parking lot. Otis gets this point too.
I’m sittin’ on the dock of the bay
Lake. But, yeah…tie on this one.
Watchin’ the tide roll away, ooh
Powerboat wake for me, which is kind of like the tide, you know, if you’re deaf. Which I’m not. Point to Otis.
I’m just sittin’ on the dock of the bay
Wastin’ time
Anyone who can stretch a two-word phrase into forty-two syllables wins the point for that alone.
I left my home in Georgia
Or, in my case, Vermont. So that is a point for me. No offence, Georgia–we’ve got maple syrup.
Headed for the Frisco Bay
Okay, upstate NY versus the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean…sorry Adirondacks—I’m giving this one to Otis.
‘Cause I’ve had nothin’ to live for
Well this got dark quickly. How did I never notice this line before? I’m just going to skip the point awarding and go to the next lyric to make sure my man Otis is okay.
It look like nothin’s gonna come my way
[Quickly Googles ‘OTIS REDDING CAUSE OF DEATH’ and starts hoping to hell before hitting Enter that it doesn’t come back with something that starts with the phrase “self-inflicted”.]
Whew. Ok. Let me just take a moment here before continuing to scan through the lyrics of the rest of the song.
Look like nothin’s gonna change…and this loneliness won’t leave me alone…
[Removes imaginary Middleweight Overthinking Champion of the World belt and hands it figuratively to the very late, very great Otis Redding.]
Okay, we’re going to stop right there. Otis is clearly the winner. (Winner? Somehow that doesn’t sound right when the prize is being the Overthinking Champion of the World.)
We see that some “relaxing” on a dock rapidly escalated into a bunch of lonely and depressed thoughts. Which is what overthinking is super good at. It makes sense that those of us prone to it suck at relaxing. Sadly, relaxing the body doesn’t mean your mind is relaxed too. I remember that, even sitting on that dock next to my daughters and bathed in the glorious summer sun, I could not stop thinking about:
- Do we have enough food for dinner?
- Are the kids too bored? Am I too boring?
- Are the girls relaxed? Is there something I should be doing to make this more relaxing?
- I feel like Otis Redding. Why does that feel like something I maybe shouldn’t say out loud to anyone.
- Tomorrow we should swing by the college my daughter is starting in the fall to get her used to the area. How do I do that in a relaxed and non-pressure-filled way? How would a normal, relaxed, and non-pressuring person do that? They would probably do it by not doing it, Paul, so maybe take the freaking hint.
- How the hell am I going to pay for college?
- Also literally how do I pay for college? How do you get money out of a 529 account? Did I misplace the checks or something? Do I have to get the college to send me an invoice and give that to the bank?
- Where the hell did the last 18 years go? What have I done with my life?
- How do I get all this figured out before I go back to work?
That was only about the first five minutes of overthinking but I’ll stop now since you get the point.
So…what now? If relaxing leads to overthinking which leads to dark places, should we just never relax? That doesn’t sound right. And also in the 80’s Frankie Goes to Hollywood said I should relax and everybody loved that song so that definitely can’t be right.
I should go line by line through that song too to get some ideas on how to be better at relaxing. [Googles the lyrics.] Ok, let’s not do that.
There is definitely value in puttering away at small tasks and keeping ourselves busy when not working on “the big stuff.” But humans need to relax and reflect as well otherwise we’ll just live a distracted life without a whole lot of personal growth. Doing things is good…but doing things without thinking about why isn’t going to lead to much growth. That’s the rub.
Luckily I have daughters that are smarter than me. When I told my youngest daughter that I was going to write about sitting on that dock this summer she said, “Oh and talk about the baby loons?”
I had forgotten entirely about the baby loons! One of the times when we were sitting on the dock this family of loons passed by on the water, their little adolescent loon heads bobbing on waves that were bigger than them. All under Mama Loon’s watchful eyes. They were maybe twenty feet from us for what felt like a half hour.
It was a moment that had that calming effect that wildlife encounters often have—where you forget about everything else because there is something happening right in front of you that doesn’t happen every day or even every year. How did I forget that? How did I forget baby loons?
Because my overthinking focuses on the worrying things, that’s how. Overthinking is, at heart, just thinking and thinking isn’t inherently bad. What gives overthinking its well-deserved bad rap is the tendency to focus on all the damned things in your life that you either don’t know the answers to yet or can’t resolve. And that’s exactly what I was doing. My daughter, on the other hand, was focusing on the good stuff—in this case, baby loons—and that’s what makes all the difference.
If we’re prone to overthinking while relaxing, well, that’s probably not going to change. However, what I can do is hijack it to find the baby loons around me. When it is time to relax I can focus all of that big brain energy into looking for that good stuff happening in the unnoticed parts of life–repurpose that overthinking to hunt instead for all the little things going on around me that make me smile.
Like baby loons floating by, completely unfazed by powerboat waves twice as big as them.
Like having the time and health to just sit on a dock with my two favorite people in the world on a beautiful summer day.
And like totally beating Otis Redding at this sitting-on-a-dock thing because I had baby loons while he was completely loon-less. That’s worth at least a hundred points for me.
(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay lyrics © BMG Rights Management, Royalty Network, Universal Music Publishing Group
Songwriters: Otis Redding / Steve Cropper
Source: LyricFind
