Ten Thousand Places

Does anyone else find the question at the end of Summer Day a bit stressful? “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / With your one wild and precious life?” I love that poem. But on days when the migraines have me on my back, it taunts me. What do I plan to do? What am I doing? Watching West Wing reruns and lying on ice packs, on a beautiful summer day. Not even being idle and blessed and strolling through the fields like Mary. “What else should I have done?” I feel like there are a lot of answers for me. A bike ride. A visit to a friend. A book to read. A story to write. Or something to bless others.

Ack, this post is just the same as most of my Wrestling the Tigers posts. I am wasting my time, wasting my life, sitting here under the weight of an enormous, merciless beast.

And the answer is still the same: Focus on the moment and what needs to be done. Do what you can and don’t worry about what you are not doing. Enjoy the times when you do feel well enough to go out and observe and worship and play, like this, and this, and this.

Still, it’s really hard not to feel like I am wasting my wild and precious life.

Who has two thumbs and just ran around Jamaica Pond for the first time ever?

This girl!!

Who fought her way through a migrainey, med-hangovery miasma and not an insignificant amount of depression, discouragement, sadness, and even despair to get outside and run today? That’s right, it’s the aforementioned two-thumbed girl.

And who has fought her way through all that crap to go to the gym 100+ times since September, and run 64 miles since February? That’s right, it’s the girl above taking her picture with her elbow!

I think I am very brave.

I find that migraines make it really difficult to maintain a long term focus.  Or short term, for that matter, but that’s to be expected.  But for all the things that require dedication and passion over time, it’s hard to have that consistency.  I feel like I am swimming just below the surface of the water, the air above representing all the things that I think are most important in life: Passion, creativity, prayer, deep thought, deep conversation, caring for others, making a difference in the world.  Under water life proceeds and can be coped with, hours follow hours, days follow days, another week brings the work days, the weekends, the new episodes of a good T.V. show, the meetings, laundry, food shopping and preparation.  Life goes on, which is a degree of success and functionality that I don’t take for granted.  But every once in a while, or even often, my head breaks the surface and I realize that I’m not writing, I’m not reading very much, I’m not praying in the ways that I want (prayer goes on, as breathing does, a function of life as a creature in relationship to her Creator; prayer never stops, but it doesn’t inspire the way it used to).  I’m not teaching English, I’m not leading a book study, I’m not even IN a class or book study.  Right now, at the end of a free day, there are books strewn across my bed that I started to read but didn’t, headphones for when I started to listen to music and then stopped, there is this blog entry open, which I may or may not finish and post.  All day I’ve been trying to find focus and passion but all there is is the dull ache, the dizziness, the light sensitivity.  I can’t even get lost in thought like I used to, building a world in my mind, finding excitement in the mere functioning of my mind.

I don’t know if any of those things will ever come back.  The best advice I’ve gotten in the miasma of the past couple of years is to live in the moment and not worry about the future.  I try.  But then I imagine a future of living in the moment, which obviously is breaking the rule, but…  I want so much to have something to work toward, even an non-tangible something.  There’s only so much satisfaction to be gotten out of doing my laundry every week.  But, like I said, after the past couple of years I don’t take clean laundry for granted.  Standing up is no small victory, and walking — both figuratively and literally — is a daily victory.  Just, if it’s always going to be one plodding foot in front of the other, then will I never again dance?