Tag: life

The Spiral

Is anything ever really over?

Is there ever a hard line? The closer you look, the blurrier it gets.

I’ve always seen in far too many shades of grey for my own good. Clarity is not a natural by-product of my thinking. But there are times in my life I look back on, with the benefit of distance, and see that they have been completed. They are no longer swirling around me, impacting my existence. They are done. They didn’t come back from the dead, and there is zero risk that they ever will. They were, and, now, they are not.

Other things, well…we go round and round the carousel, and sometimes we forget how it looked from over here, until here we are again and, oh yes, just like last time. But different. But still.

It’s not clean, and it’s not easy, and if you don’t laugh you might cry. When will it be over? Maybe it’s just the kind of thing that never ends.

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Grief

There is so much to grieve.

Who we could have been. Who we’ll never be.

What we could have had. What we did have and lost. What we’ve never been, and will never be, even anywhere close to having.

There is so much to grieve. And so little time to grieve in. We could live our entire life in grief. But where would be the life in that?

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Someone

Sometimes I try to work out if I could still be someone. Do I still have time to become Neil Gaiman? Or have I already fucked it? I definitely can’t be Elon or Sufjan or Jason or Guy. But there are a few options left on the table.

Why are all the people I want to be men? We’ve grappled with this before, Yve, and now is not the time to get into it.

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An ache

Do we all ache for more time?

I’ve heard people hypothesise that death is a blessing specifically because if we had time stretching out into infinity we’d grow disinterested and depressed with life – no urgency, no impetus, nothing to make the endeavour worthwhile.

I proffer a disagreement.

I can see that being an option, of course – it’s easy to see how that could develop. But JESUS FUCKING CHRIST THE WORLD IS A MAGICAL PLACE THAT IT WOULD TAKE MILLIONS OF LIFETIMES TO SCRATCH THE SURFACE OF AND THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING OF IT! So many things unlike all the others, how could you ever get bored? I would like to dig and dig and dig.

So give me infinity. I’ll risk depression and stagnancy to find out how it feels. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong.

At the very least I think it would be nice to decide when the time should run out. But I also suspect that, if we had all the time in the world, our nature would gradually become less human and more like that of our universe. So, rather than transitioning from day to night, life to death, we would, inch by inch, transcend the dichotomy until, like the world around us, we simply were.

But what do I know? The Universe itself may ache for more time.

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Intermittent

It’s hard, once you stop, to start up again.

My life is set up to be intermittent. That’s not my preference, it’s just the way it is.

As much as I inherently rail against routine, I do better with consistency and, knowing this, I have tried to seek it out. Unfortunately I have not been able to collaborate with the main actors in my life to create a level of daily consistency for myself. Instead I have a reasonably predictable, undulating, biweekly cycle, during which different areas of my life flash on and off for multiple days at a time. I live in binary. All or nothing.

I’m good at all.

I’m good at nothing.

The switching…I’m not so good at that.

I waste a lot of energy trying, and regularly failing, to make the transition from one to the other. My life demands I simultaneously switch one area off, and another area on, according to its schedule. The whole point of the cycle is that all things have their place, but what if I can’t get to that place on time, because I wandered too far into the depths of the other place and I haven’t found my way out yet?

I did better when, despite my schedule conspiring against me in ways I was unable to remedy, I constructed consistency for myself. Daily consistency. A reliable thread. Anything less simply adds to the chaos, as much as I’d like to believe otherwise.

The most successful thread I constructed was writing daily. Writing meaningfully and intentionally every day. But life got noisy and I let it lapse. I let myself lapse. I dropped the thread. And that was a mistake. A mistake all too familiar.

I haven’t figured out, so far in my life, how to keep on doing anything.

The only daily consistency I’ve had in recent months is my morning coffee. Its effect is dopaminergic enough and its procurement easy enough to ensure its inclusion regardless of my week’s topography. But everything else is up for grabs, and up for debate.

And that is, quite possibly, the crux of all my problems.

Nobody except me cares, really. It’s not their problem. I couldn’t make it their problem if I tried. I did try, in some cases, so I’ve learned that lesson. There’s no point looking outward.

This is my life. How do I fit myself into it?

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Checkpoints

We all make our choices, and I thought I’d have more to show for mine by now. But that doesn’t mean they were the wrong choices, or that I’d necessarily want the things I thought I’d have to show. Or the things I see other people showing.

I am on the road as we all are, but I don’t need to hit the checkpoints that other people have set. I’ve set my own. And they may take longer to reach, and it may be a more tiring journey, but that’s okay, because that’s the path I’ve chosen. And for that path I am right on track. It may just be that my journey requires more faith, because the checkpoints are further away, or there aren’t so many people up ahead of me to validate the route I’m taking.

We have the right to choose our own checkpoints. And perhaps the responsibility, depending on how you look at it. The world doesn’t make it easy, but it’s important to remember that that doesn’t make it wrong. Our internal compass is a far more accurate method of navigation than following the landmarks that others have decreed.

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