Monday, June 6, 2016

June 5, 2016 • Anaconda, MT


I could say that I am doing here what I want to be doing—writing. But there is something wrong with that. If I wanted to be writing, that is, if I loved writing, I’d do more of it. Instead I experience a kind of painful resistance to sitting down to the blank screen. Now, fingers on keyboard watching black characters dance onto the electronic white page, I feel negative. Hateful even. 
I raise my eyes to the surrounding scene, green in the extreme, capped by a powder-blue sky, and acknowledge the urge or inclination to go out and do something. Two blocks away the hot springs pools await us, the tennis court calls us to action. Action, action. Activity. Counter-balance to sitting, contemplating, creating. 
Can I call my writing “creating?” It seems long since I produced a stream of words with meaning beyond the blah, blah, blah of a daily routine. Drivel about the mundane and ordinary, the stuff of contentment. 
When I decided to marry again, I wondered often if I was “settling for” something, in exchange for something else. Okay, what are those “somethings?” Settling for security, in exchange for passion. That’s more honest. Those words—security and passion—put a solid framework around the idea. Indeed it seems this is what I’ve done. My life is lukewarm, a shallow stream meandering through valleys, rather than a fierce, icy river racing down mountainsides. There is no pain in this, only a dull ache and an awareness of age and death. 
If we knew in our youth that the march of life was toward a slow, meaningless death, would we leap from the tops of buildings or cliffs to fly toward immediate and dramatic ends? Likely not. None of us wants to end so long as life looms large before us. 

It is good that the shadows in the mirrors disappear when we fix our gazes square upon the glass.

No comments: