Blog-speak

I ran away from home when I turned five. I wanted to find my own way. In a perhaps unique tantrum for a child so young, I was angry with the world, convinced I knew more than the grown ups, that I had it right and they knew nothing (Don't most of us do this at 13 or something?)

At five, I wandered off into the world to pretend to be a grown up who actually knew it all (unlike all the others who had NO clue!). I used big words and wore nice clothes every day. I 'did lunch' with other people who wore nice clothes and talked about value propositions and "incentivizing" projects. I bought a fancy car and dreamed of grand vacations.

You'd never have believed I was only five, honestly. I felt like a 30 year old professional, in my coordinated outfits and pretty red car zipping around like a California girl in the movies.

But even 30 year olds slip into sleep dreams every night- dreams in which they are five, and wandering far from home, and trip in high heels. Dreams filled with simple words, like "writer" and "hope" and "want" and "love", where big words only mess up the patterns. Dream-spaces where there are no slots big enough or complicated enough to fit grown-up things like budgets and therapy and value propositions.

These ideas are far too big for a five year old to handle, even when it's pretending to be 30. So if you're still reading, forgive this blog, while it tries to find its way back. You see, it only turned five last month, and it is still figuring a lot of things out.

My days of late have filled themselves without my noticing it really. For someone (like me) capable of over-reacting hugely to the tiniest annoyance, I would have expected to notice this. The days overflow with tasks at work, chores at home and desperate attempts to organize. Suddenly, I have no time to garden. No time to harvest tomatoes and basil, or watch the chrysanthemums put out new shoots. I have no time to think or feel my way to words in this space.

And yet it is not this lack of time that bothers me, but the abundance of doubt that fills it. Too many conflicting ideas, of what priorities at work should be, of who I am and what I'm doing with my time. Attempting to sort through the tangled skeins only makes me trip over the one thread that holds taut and strong through the mess.

I am drawn back to one of my favorite quotes. To paraphrase, who is the worse off: he who has never seen the light, or he who saw it and went blind, and now only has the memory of light?

Yes, that is an over-dramatic representation of the situation. I wish I had the time, and the confidence, to lay out my tangled web better than this. Perhaps this post is a first step to figuring it out.