Harmony and Holy Smoke...

Well, I'm 22 days into my month off, what I thought could be my Mejuwrimo, and yet this is the first time I've really sat down to write anything. I think I have been undergoing a paradigm shift, perhaps my internal, pre-adolescent version of a midlife crisis, of late. It is not such a bad thing, I'm finding. For years now, I have struggled to reconcile the thoughts that 'I should be doing something more with myself' and 'I am doing exactly what I am supposed to be doing; if I wanted to do more, I would'. The former seems a little self-sabotaging and that latter just like an excuse. It is only recently that I have begun to recognize the harmony of these impressions. One thing that I have been doing quite a lot of this month is reading. I love to read, and have done so since it was cognitively possible as a toddler. However, reading is one activity that I find tends to take the back seat to a multitude of other activities, such as work, running, keeping up with television shows, tending to the home and writing. All of the former activities are perfectly reasonable ways to spend your time. Writing, in fact, is often described as if were a protected parkland, with the land-grabbing juggernaut of Reading always threatening to tear into its borders. In other words, writers shouldn't waste time reading. It stifles the muse, I suppose.

I will say this, though--lapsed author or not, I've read some great books this month. "A Dirty Job" by Christopher Moore was a darkly wonderful romp. "Life of Pi" by Yann Martel deserved every bit as much tout as it received. "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer could not have been more gripping. I think I actually had some frost bite in my toes by the end of the two days it took to read it. Anyway, I digress. I digress in writing, which I suppose serves my point about the shift: Harmony.

Ultimately, I have been a lot more generous in allowing myself to do whatever I want to do of late. I haven't picked up my guitar or written a song in months, and I am not feeling bad about that. I just auditioned for a play after nearly two years of saying with certainty that I did not want to perform any longer. Last year I ran a road race that I haven't run since high school (half my life ago, to give some perspective), and haven't stopped running since. I recently went through a couple months of writing every day because I thought that was the direction I was supposed to be heading, and yet, as I said, it's been nearly a month since I did that. There is a circularity to it all. God is in the roundness of things, as I believe Wally Lamb wrote.

It makes me think of cloud bursting. Clouds are water vapor, sometimes soaring, sometimes falling. At times they appear to have a very definite form, blowing in a specific direction, and others, amorphously vague and aimless in every respect. I remember the picture of the sky in my head from this past July 4th celebration. Once a few more substantial fireworks had been set off, the smoke trails in the sky resembled pale and languid jellyfish, lazily drifting over a cumulus reef. If you've gazed into the North Atlantic waters in August from virtually any New England coast, you will know what I was seeing. Aimless and vast, yet definite and finite. Such is our experience. Mine, anyhow.

Cheers....