If I hadn’t challenged myself to posting a blog every day for fifty days, I wouldn’t be sitting here at the computer trying to write . . . something. Anything.
Normally, I would have gone to dance class today (ballet and tap, it would have been), which might have given me something to write about, but I woke with a sore throat and didn’t want to push my luck by going anyway — everyone I know caught cold this fall, and some people have had it for months. Not that I want to whine about being under the weather — that gets old. Actually, I don’t want to whine at all. I’ve been feeling good lately — I’ve spent many hours hiking in the desert, and I always feel most myself when I’m walking, especially when I’m walking out in the wild. Perhaps it’s the rhythm of walking that brings me to myself, or maybe it’s the wild inside connecting to the wild outside.
But today is not a day for walking. Or hiking. Or being any kind of wild.
It’s a day for . . . I don’t know. Just being, maybe.
I’ve been scrolling through my archives looking for inspiration for today’s blog post. My challenge was specifically worded so I didn’t have to write something new — I just had to post something. But I couldn’t find anything that spoke to me about me today.
I feel such a slug at times, as if I have always just flowed through my days, accomplishing not much of anything (which, though we seldom admit it, is living just as much as anything else), but I look at those previous posts and see not a flowing but a flowering. Adventures and explorations galore. A multitude of life-changing losses. A few life-changing gains. And yet, oddly, none of those things seem to have anything to do with me.
Each day, it seems, I am born anew, a woman with not much of a past, a woman with an unknown future. I was going to write “a woman with not much of a future,” but who’s to say what will happen? I remember times when nothing seemed to happen, such as the long years when Jeff never seemed to get sicker, never seemed to get better. And then suddenly, he did get sicker, and just as suddenly he died. During all those years when we would talk about his being gone, I could never have imagined what my life would become. And that was a mere seven years ago. Three years ago, my father died, and oddly despite my occasional nomadism, I am mostly living the same life as I did with him, though without responsibilities and in a different house, and I could never have imagined that, either.
The days continue to flow, but to what purpose, I don’t know.
Maybe a new flowering.
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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Unfinished, Madame ZeeZee’s Nightmare, Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.
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December 1, 2017 at 4:55 am
such days can be our very best “me” days
December 2, 2017 at 12:37 pm
A few years ago, I had a go of doing the challenge of a blog a day, for a month the first few days were easy, then it started to get more difficult, and then it palled on me, I vowed never to do it again and I haven’t and wont 😈
50 days???
Have you given any thought to seeing a shrink lately Pat? 😈 👿 🐻 😀
December 2, 2017 at 2:38 pm
Actually, my first blog challenge was to write every day for 100 days. Then I kept going. Wrote a blog a day for three or four years. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should think about a shrink!
December 2, 2017 at 10:57 pm
Then you certainly should go see one 😀
December 3, 2017 at 2:20 pm
Or stop blogging.