I Keep Thinking

That's the real problem, isn't it?  I just keep on thinking.  It sometimes gets in me trouble.

I keep thinking I ought to write...something yet I feel particularly uninspired to do so.

I keep thinking I ought to start those Christmas gifts. Still, there lay the yarn and thread and fabric waiting patiently to be crafted into something useful and, generally speaking, warm or at least decorative.

I keep thinking I ought to clean out my closet. But, that would mean I would have to clean up the stuff in front of the closet door so I can get the door open.  That feels like two chores instead of one to me.  So I put it off.  Again.

I keep thinking that I'll stop at the garage and have them listen to the squeaky noise the brakes on my car are making these days.  I usually think that as I'm pulling into my driveway and going into the house after work.

I keep thinking I'll try that new recipe I found a few weeks ago.  But first I need to clean up the spilled and burnt on apple pie filling in the oven.   Bah!  Oven cleaning is for the birds.  Not to mention that I have to decide if I really want to learn to like eggplant or if I just like the idea of learning to like it and really just want to continue growing it because the plant has velvety, soft leaves, the fruits are that lovely, shiny aubergine color, and the flowers glow with an ethereal, purple light that I find rather enchanting.

I keep thinking that if I just wait long enough, the right answers will come to me like a gift from the universe.  The answers to what you may ask?  Well, that's part of the problem...or so I keep thinking.

It's a familiar litany for me. The things I think I ought to do or say or be and the mental retorts that keep me from doing or saying or being the way I think I should do.  It's a melancholy thing that happens in the autumn.  But it also seems to me that I have a little more than usual to feel melancholy about this fall.

Don't get me wrong. I do like this time of year with the harvest and the changing colors and the smell of wood smoke and the crisp, fallen leaves.  I like the chill in the air and the rediscovery of that hoodie I bought a few summers ago in Colorado and forgot all about until now.  But, it's easy for me to get lost in the flow of the season and start to wind down myself. 

Maybe it isn't all bad this slowing and withdrawing even ever-so-slightly from the world.  In spite of what the internet and the news media tells us, it's not actually necessary to be productive at all times, is it?  By taking time out just to breathe and exist we are not inadequate parents, lousy partners, lazy employees, or just bad people in general.  We are not doing it wrong.  Living a life of balance is definitely desirable if not absolutely crucial in our society today.

Or so I keep thinking.

What Lies Beneath

Lovely, isn't it?  I see a whole lot of this on my frequent commutes to and from the city. This photo was taken on an especially pretty looking February day with brilliant blue, sunny skies and clean, dry roads. What you can't see in the photo is the gale force wind that was blowing my car all over the highway.

Life is like that sometimes.  It's often the things you can't see, or those that aren't at least readily evident, that create the largest impact.  Think about the last time you accidentally bit the inside of your mouth.  It's a small thing that nobody else knows about unless you tell them, but you can't think about anything else every time you eat or drink for a couple of days.  At least I can't when it happens to me.  But my pain threshold is pretty low.

I've done a lot of soul searching the last couple of weeks.  I spend quite a bit of time on my own when I stay in the city at The Rookery (a nickname I came up with for the place I stay when I'm there.  It was either that or the catacombs which is far too maudlin...neither is perfect, really).  When I first started staying there, it was great!  I had all this time on my own to do the things that I couldn't find time for at home.  I made baby gifts.  I tried new recipes.  I crocheted Christmas gifts and ornaments.  I read an actual book.  I tried English paper-piecing a small quilt which still isn't done but I work on it a bit here and there.

These little hexagons are all stitched together by hand.  It takes FOREVER.

But in the last couple weeks, The Rookery has become more of a pigeon hole.  It's a nice place. It's clean. There's a balcony.  There's a garage that keeps me from having to go out into bad weather to start on my way to work in the mornings.  It's quite comfortable.  I have my own space and I appreciate it so very much.  However, after a while on my own, I start to go a little nutty.

Yeah, yeah, I know.  How can you tell?  Ha. Ha.

In all that silence and by-my-self-ed-ness, it's easy to lose sight of the things that really matter. The little things that well up inside me can and do take over.  All those little things that I try so hard not show the world and that nobody would ever probably guess start to press their way out.  When it's just me, then me is all I have to look at.

I recently read a quote that said a life unexamined wasn't worth living and I suppose that's true to some extent.  I would like to counter and say that a life over-examined isn't properly lived at all.  Pieces of it are re-lived and replayed over and over.  Mistakes are re-made and magnified.  Molehills become mountains. I am haunted by my own creations. 

I am especially haunted lately.  Things have been happening in my life that I have no control over.  I feel betrayed...used...even though I probably have no right to feel that way.  That doesn't change the fact that I feel what I feel and in the big, empty shell of by-my-self-ed-ness, that feeling is enormous.  It crowds everything else out, good and bad, until all I'm left with is a certain sense of having somehow earned feeling so damned awful and alone.  What goes around, comes around is what we used to call it.

Which is, I'm told, utter nonsense.  Sitting here at home with my husband and my dogs and my real life all around me, I can see the wisdom in those words. The trick is remembering that when I'm holed up in that pigeon hole.

I keep telling myself that everything will be okay in the end.  And, if it's not okay, then it's clearly not the end.