I think that sometimes I have to translate the vague sense of discontent I feel with a few impending events into something more useful. It's curious how the sensation is almost physically definable, as if on the edges of some literal mind I feel the embroidery of a nervous waiting. I sometimes think of seeking out things worth fighting for, but overlook that fighting for what I have and what I can achieve matters a great deal.
I bought one of those heavy wooden television stands yesterday, for use as an aquarium stand. I paid less than twenty dollars for it at at the "used junk" thrift shop. I took it out to my car, only to find that it does not fit. I had quite a twenty minutes turning it this way and that, by trunk and front door and back door. A kind fellow a decade or two older than I am stopped to help (in Garland, Texas, people routinely stop to help), but the square peg did not fit into any of the various elliptical holes. I'll bring back a larger vehicle, with any fortune, to solve that problem. It didn't quite all fit, but I'll sort it out.
I wish all my conundra and dilemmae were like that. Misplan, strive, fail, redirect, replan, achieve. The things that hit me lately, I believe, are the inevitable passing of people I care about. This has been a year when someone close to me has died, and soneone close to me is seriously ill. I feel that note of dread, like an edge, an aluminum foil border. I recognize that I must redefine and replan the way I approach things--that this is all a kind of lesson I am learning about the finite nature of it all.
But right now I'm still trying to slide these ideas into a trunk not quite large enough to hold them.
The recognition is, I suppose, the first step towards the acceptance. Lately, I see this pathway ahead a little clearer. I wish I could report it was free of stones, but I think I can walk it.
I don't live with a lot of day to day misery. I'm one of those people who lives contentedly almost all the time. I'm fortunate not to live with a lot of palpable misery. I do take this meaning from things,though--that it's a time to do what matters to me. Every time is a time to do what matters to one.
I understand the urge to run off to the metaphoric circus that some folks have in mid-life, though apparently I am to be spared any literal travel. I'm instead living in the space I've built, which looks so much to me like the space in which I'd like to live. But I try to remember each day to work on the space in which I live, to make things a bit better around me. I sometimes long to do big things, but I have before me the opportunity to actually do small things very well.
Perhaps that's the key, too--to do things in front of me instead of daydreaming, to live in the moment instead of in the dread. It's worked so well for me before that I cannot imagine why I ever forget that lesson. But I find that life is for me a series of flash cards to help me memorize things I should already know.
