(pic by Cato)
Too many difficulties with managing time. Each day I awake and blink a few times, then it is noon. I am already too focused on work, perhaps. It is good in one way, then disastrous in others, making it difficult to maintain a coherent sense of self.
I must list myself among the many things that I seem incapable of managing. There now exists money, time, diet, impulse, oblivion, and of course love already crowding that catalog of handy pocket disasters.
I have been back to work for just over a day and I have sunk myself into runaway ambitions.
How can this be?
Is "ambitions" the right word? Perhaps nervous success, a touch of productivity escapism.
Efficiency-ism.
I have become less flexible, negotiating changes in slower, wider arcs. I snap back into the shape I was with a crispness that resembles a dried branch rather than the flexibility one would wish for themselves. I have lost touch with the sinuousness of youth. Everybody screams "Yoga!!!" at me, but I can't seem to listen.
I wish that I did not have to believe these things about myself, but the denial of them causes suffering. It is never very easy to be honest about life changes. There appears to be a fundamentalism about the subject. People seem to insist that admitting to aging is the worst thing you can possibly do, short of complaining about it, of course.
I try to swap out my feelings on the subject every so often, just to make sure that I am never quite right concerning it. There lies danger, too.
Trying times awaiting me at home; new obstacles to overcome, new landscapes to be arranged. The mind asks if there is ever an end to it but then the heart shudders at the answer.
Something is crumbling around me, the past and future disintegrating at my feet. The things that I have counted on, even in loving failure, are shifting and falling away.
It forces some self-examination, yet also works to deny self-honesty. I can hear the voices mumbling and re-offering the same truths that have not worked before.
A friend has engaged me in a daily exercise, one in which I am to publicly list three things each day that I am grateful for.
It seems easy, though my answers feel either too specific or too vague. Is that part of the nature of gratitude, or at least my version of it, that it exists mainly in abstractions and analysis?
I don't want that to be true, of course. I wish for gratitude to exist through and throughout.
There are things that I still struggle with:
I loved her too much, for too long, but not well enough.
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