When a writer stops writing the reasons are usually pretty expected. Your mind suddenly goes blank and all of the topics that you had in the back of your head wiggling around go away or seem irrelevant or unimportant. I talked to my therapist about my lack of writing lately and she threw it back at me again like they always do and said what if I wrote about exactly that so here we are. Writing about not writing. What could be more boring than that? I can’t think of a thing.
This page began as a way for me to write about the bright and the dark and everything in between it as part of my life with MS but it became so much more. There were so many high and low points that it was easy to figure out what to write about back then because everyday life was so extreme there was a practically a topic in every minute of every day. Now I’m living more in the in between. Dr. Billsky challenges me to try to live in between to write about that. Here’s what The In Between looks like for me right now. I do a lot of New York Times Crossword puzzles. I tell myself that I do them to keep my brain active – challenge myself so that my brain doesn’t become slow and less active. I sit at my computer working on these puzzles every single day like it’s my job. I do the New York Times daily crossword puzzle, the Mini and the Midi version of the crossword puzzle that make me happy when I can complete them. There are also two New York Times word games that I play on a regular basis one of them is called Wordle and I challenged myself every day to uncover the Wordle of the day. Again these don’t seem like very exciting things to do but they keep me happy and I’m not sure why I feel the need to explain or to justify it. I feel like I’m overly defensive about my choice for how to when live nobody’s really questioning that. But me.
Maybe the real truth is the path to a life worth living is in these quieter times where mountains aren’t being climbed and words of wisdom aren’t flowing every day but in the quiet times when nothing is happening, nothing but everyday life. The things that happen when nobody else is looking. When we’re not trying to put on a show or solve the world’s problems but just trying to exist. I’ve never considered these questions before until Dr. Billsky put them to me and forced me to look at the things I’ve been avoiding looking at. And here we are.
Developing a life worth of living takes a lot of hard work and retrospection. You have to figure out what you care about and why. Who are the people in your life who deserve your time and deserve your attention? And then how do you invest in those people properly so that you’re nurturing the important relationships that find their way is into your home over time when you appear not to be looking. Sometimes these are family members. For me my family is very close to me they matter a lot. Sometimes these people are friends. They matter a lot. More and more my friends have become people that I keep in touch with via text message or Facebook post but that’s also OK because those are the easiest methods for getting everything out and making a connection when it’s convenient and when it can be received. Once again I frowned on these methods of communication finding them somehow faulty and not as important as the face-to-face interactions that happened between people in my day-to-day basis in the past. When those day-to-day interactions were so much easier and more normal in my life. Now that you seem like long lost times of fairytales.
The truth is however I don’t necessarily miss casual face-to-face as much as I thought I would. I was an inherently social animal in my past life. I was out there doing – seeing and being seen as frequently as it was possible to be I was in the middle of it all. And I feel like now in these years of my life where I’m entering my 60s I’m ready to slow down. I’m ready for my time of enjoyment should be in my house where it’s built around my comfort and nothing more. It makes me happy to spend my day doing crossword puzzles and playing on my computer and that’s exactly what I should be doing. Nobody should be questioning that especially not me. So here we are coming full circle again where my biggest enemy is myself.
The places in between are the hardest places to live in and that’s surprising. You would think the dark places would be more difficult but the dark places or where you expect to deal with the hardest things. There’s no surprise there. You know it’s coming even though the specifics aren’t clear, you’re prepared for dealing with it. The places in between surprise you because you’re not sure what to expect if you don’t know what’s coming next and that’s where you find yourself having your most difficult times. At least in my experience that’s how it’s been. I’ll be interested to hear how some of my readers might find these places to be for themselves. I’ll keep exploring this notion because it’s not a one post kind of topic it’s where I find myself living right now so it’s a series of topics that I’ll roll up into a big question and that question is about living a life or living. I know I’ll get there. I just have to have the patience.
Source: bethybrightanddark.com