I’m slipping. It’s interesting to observe that in myself.
I am devoid of ideas and inspiration. I am committed to this blog but feel I’ve somehow lost the plot. I want to write about my difficult past and tease out the lessons that might help someone moving forward. But my difficult past should light my way forward, no?
Well, that’s what I used to think. Turns out I am just a bumbling, struggling, flawed human being after all. My difficulties have not admitted me to any circle of esteemed healers and wise women. I am not a fraud exactly. I write my truth as I see and experience it. But I am not much of anything else these days either.
I remember back to my heyday in writing for a living. There was no room for slippage back then. Deadlines had to be met. Ministers needed to be briefed on the event you’d written a speech for them to deliver. Brochure copy had to make it to the printer when they said so – not when I felt like it.
For many years, this felt perfectly normal. Writing can become formulaic and predictable. I saw and produced so much of that writing when I was in academia and government. There really wasn’t much originality expected or required. What was required was a finessing of someone’s already established ideas (in academia) and parroting the ruling party’s policies (in government).
Stick to the expected script and not much could go wrong. Such is the skill and expectation put upon professionals. As long as words could be strung together in a type of flow with logical segues, there wasn’t too much more expected of a writer.
So I balked a bit when I read about an author who feared her award-winning novel would be the peak of her career. She spoke of being afraid to start a new project because it might not live up to the one that had brought her such accolades.
Apparently this more or less happened to Harper Lee, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird. Given the achievement of the novel when it was published in 1960, you could hardly blame her. She didn’t publish another novel until 2015. Turns out it was a forgotten novel by Lee and something of a prequel to Mockingbird.
All to say lately I’ve been struck by how much my head isn’t much into “healing” these days.
Instead, it is into plants and flowers and fruit trees and birds in the morning and flying overhead and gentle rainfall. And flower and seed catalogs. Now those catalogs are where a first-rate horticultural career could easily be founded.
Then it occurred to me – in that sardonic way when you hit your head and say “duh” – I am living life as a “healed” person and a “survivor.” There is no hubris in that.
Like my years of sobriety and my beautiful delicate marriage, I know how fragile and fleeting both good and bad can be in our lives. And I wonder why it seems at just that very moment when you have accepted and adapted to a raft of changes, you get more change.
I guess that is supposed to help us grow and “evolve” but it sounds like a pretty dirty trick to me. So don’t be surprised if my verbiage turns to the wonders that surround me these days.
For someone who spent most of her life running after happiness and safety and validation, it seems logical that when she gets it – knowing its’ fragility – you’d best hunker down to savor and enjoy it.
Maybe I am not slipping at all.
Maybe I am deliberately slowing down.
To smell the roses.
“Stopping to smell the roses is an act of appreciation and recognizing the source of the goodness in our lives.” Wikipedia
That checks out.
Expressive Compulsive 