In the last many days, I’ve had time to think about this space in my life and its accumulation of nearly two years of what passes for me these days — me in writing, that is. Whenever I run through the archives and skim the content, so many thoughts come to mind about when the piece was written — the season, the weather on a given day, what I was preoccupied with or annoyed about. It’s been more and more difficult to write here and so the frequency has decreased and I’ve found myself adjusting to that, but not particularly enjoying it. I’ve taken the time on my occasional walks to make mental plans where I’d whip myself into writerly shape working on one project at this point in the day and another later on, somehow fitting it all in.
The implementation lasted one day.
One.
I’d decided to do some admin work related to my sites and busied myself in all that it entails, which is a lot when one might consider that I currently qualify for the old dog aspect of the whole can’t teach new tricks classification. Bound and determined to prove it wrong, I spent ridiculous amounts of time reading codex and phoning and thinking and whining to get everything moved and it just never worked.
With every piece I had nearly worked out, another arose and on a computer screen it looks like two window open with several tabs to access in each one. My head spun with angst over root directories and files, php and FTPs, domains and DNS. Having much experience in the area of reading research, I can tell you that when content is dense, even proficient readers default to subvocalizing in order to digest and comprehend new information. It helps — but only if one is also willing to repeat the process over and over with little or no distraction.
Ahem.
I Twittered much. I wallowed in Bubble Bazinganess. I bonded with Facebook finally, and satisfied my creative spirit cooking, shooting photos of what I’d cooked, editing those photos, and then finally writing about what I’d cooked. *insert note regarding food obsession here* It only fills the hours, but it never quite fills the spot that this space fills and the longer it was unavailable to me, the more I realized that although I could live without it, I just didn’t want to.
I thought about people who have lost posessions in a fire, or who have had property vandalized. I morbidly recalled my trauma induced by the loss of my hard drive on my beloved MacBook and all the glorious photos of our trip to the UK and several years of my son’s boyhood. I conjured up all the images of loss I could to add to my incessant mulling over of not having this space because I may have been careless. And if I had, nothing could be done other than start again, because that’s what I do. I’m good at it.
So that’s what I was ready to do this morning when I sat down. Start again.
And metaphorically, that’s what I’ve decided to say I’ve done, because clearly my archives are in order and everything is up and running. But I have perspective I didn’t have a week or so ago and need to put it to good use.
It seemed appropriate to make a few visual changes to celebrate moving on with new purpose.
Ahhh……
If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.
Be satisfied with what you have.
Every cloud has a silver lining.
Dude, make it a double. That was a close call.
