A Messy Room

A messy room.

Pants and shoes litter the floor; a few glasses have made their way up, but never back down to the kitchen sink again; papers are strewn about; the sheets are bunched and tossed across the bed. You have to clean this. You know you have to clean this. You even want to clean this, but the question rattles around in your head: “Where the fuck do I start?!”

It’s been a month or so since my last blog. I wish I were more consistent; not for you, but for me. It’s good for me to write. Sometimes I wonder if I was the only one left on the planet, if I’d still write. I think I would. Writing for me is a form of prayer. (this is a tangent) We pray, we meditate, to commune with God, with the Unknown of all that surrounds us, with all that swells within us. We pray to both know God better, and to come to know ourselves better. Watching my words march out onto paper, even the typos, the mistakes, the outlandish things, helps me focus, helps me concentrate, helps me slow myself a little. When things are slower it is easier to examine.

So why haven’t I written? It’s not for lack of thoughts or experiences. My mind doesn’t shut up, and my legs don’t stop moving much. My life keeps on living. So why haven’t I written? The truth is, I’ve had too much to write. I have really good ideas for a fiction book, for a blog on love, for a blog on rejection, for a blog on life choices, for a blog on career paths, for a blog on…you name it, not to mention an ending for my book. SO MANY IDEAS and thoughts, and not a completed work to show.

Paralysis.

Where do you start? You start with a sock. That one sock, which somehow managed to drape itself on the night stand, next to that now empty glass of water that quenched your thirst in the middle of the night. You pick up that sock, and you put it in the hamper. And you move on to the next one. There is no other way.

For an instant, I think we like to really imagine what it would be like to be able to snap our fingers and have the whole thing done. When that instant passes, reality sets in, and with it the dual realizations of how severely limited we are and of how much work is required of us. Frustration. Life is full of work. Full of mother f$%*@$ work. Sometimes, we revert to child like states, and we pout and scream and yell in protest, in anger, in defiance against God and life and whatever else; other times we just stand there completely immobile and nothing gets done. Both are equally destructive in the end.

And so the only thing to do is start. Starting this blog, I wanted to go back and write others, but I decided to just write this one, to put it out, to finish it. It may not be the best, but it is something, and it’s a good step towards other good steps.

How can one describe the sea? The whole sea? It’s too much. But focus on a ripple, on a tiny swell, how it grows and recedes, grows and recedes, ebbing and flowing, and maybe you can describe that, and in that description come to know the sea a bit better.

We will not accomplish everything. We will not see all there is to see in the world. We will die someday, and some things may be left undone. But, while we’re here, we can do what we can do, sock by sock, blog by blog, goal by goal, ripple by ripple, and avoid being swallowed in the sea.