Tuesday, August 5, 2014

To Do or Not To Do

I haven't written in sometime.  I was hoping that the crisp & clear mountain air would clear my mind and clarify my future.  Coming home I had more questions & less answers.  It was a few weeks battling with major doubts and depression that my family decided that our season here in India is at an end.  So over the next few months we will begin to close this chapter of our life and figure out what our future holds.  Part of why my writing has stopped as you can see the 30 day exercise has concluded for the other contributors and unfortunately it didn't develop into a habit.  Scipio's work I dearly loved and now I'm not sure if any of the story lines will have a conclusion.  Maybe once we get into the same time zone we can work out at the very least some game-able clash between our forces to dictate the story line's conclusion.

The decision to stay or go in India was very difficult as it was one of those decisions that had to be made.  By not deciding we were deciding to stay.  Not deciding and staying by default robbed us of some of the intentionality that we had once had and we needed to stay for a reason or leave for a reason.  I've always had the habit of not making decisions to make decisions.  Whenever we were in a class and the teacher told the community to find a partner or a group I usually lingered until someone else chose me or I was assigned into the group that was still missing members.  This almost always did not work in my favour.  When one does well scholastically and doesn't aggressively make sure to work one's way into a group of students with similar standards the socially adepts underachievers will very quickly recruit you.  Unfortunately I couldn't wait this time around for someone to choose for us and we chose to return home.

It is interesting that one of my repeated messages in this blog to myself has been to get up and go do something.  That has been very hard since I got back from the trip.  Debilitating depression coupled with a lack of knowing what my future held severely demotivated me from doing much of anything.  It is hard to invest around you and spend time making things, both concrete and abstract, if you are going to leave those things behind anyway.  Now that we are leaving there are a few things I'd like to make before we go but a lot of my attention has shifted to the going and getting there, which I am attempting to curtail as much as possible, but it is hard.

I am going to continue to attempt to do some writing here as it has been writing here that really helped me before my Himalayan trip, which was fantastic & brutal by the way.  I do think, however, that on top of this outlet there is a book which I titled and never really wrote several years ago and I feel as though the nebulous idea finally has a few legs to stand on and so I'm going to see if we can't find some more legs in the strange place where thoughts become words.  Some of you know that I was working on a book earlier this year which probably will go no further simply because in my research I could not prove my thesis.  Though the thesis was not necessarily wrong, it did not have the scope that I thought it would have and so I decided it would be literary dishonesty to try and make it work.  I'm glad I didn't try to fake it but I was a bit disappointed that a ball that finally had began to roll hit a stump and stopped rolling.  Onward and upward.  I've been doing a bit of daydreaming recently as a major family shift in my position at work as well as my geographical location allows a certain width to re-invent oneself.  To stop doing things that have developed into bad habits and start focusing on things that I should have been doing all along.

In the midst of the whirlwind of what I wish I was doing one of the things that stood out to me was that I would really enjoy writing and I shouldn't stop.  I will not become an author by just writing in an obscure blog everyday but I definitely won't become an author if I don't.  But I guess author is like musician.  I am an author because I am authoring right now.  Musician is not a title strictly reserved for those who sell platinum records nor to child prodigies but simply to those who music and so I will continue to auth.  The other swirling ideas were commune handyperson/pipesmith/bike customizer.  As hard as I try to be a craftsman in the code I write for a living, the lack of tangible art is difficult for me to quantify in that way.  I would love to be a craftsperson for a living.  I probably wouldn't like the lack of consistent income, the ups and downs that go with living that way, but I love creating things with my hands.  I love motorcycles but though that is a wide market it is flooded and I don't know if I'm actually very good at it.  Pipe creation I think I have the beginnings for a skill there but that market is a narrow market that may also be flooded with people of my level.  Until I publish that book that allows me some way to smooth out the financial highs and lows of the craftsperson's life it will probably remain a simple dream of mine.

My parents in their self-confessed "fruit & nuts days" attempted a communal life, living off the land.  There short time attempting that with friends convinced them that it was not for them.  Apparently I am genetically predisposed to the same folly.  I love the idea of feeding my family directly with the work of my hands and building/fixing.  But those who have the freedom to do that tend to start out from a pretty strong financial situation that gives the flexibility to not earn a living in the normalized sense.  If I were to spring for a few acres I would have that pesky mortgage of said acrage to deal with that would require some normalized income.  I don't think most banks consider vegetables legal tender.  I also might possibly hate it.  Who knows.  I sure don't.  But until that sweet book deal gives me some plush bank account that lets me buy those acres with cash, I'll keep trucking along hoping to find that bit of peace between who I am and what I do.

1 comment:

Scipio Africanus said...

"I'll keep trucking along hoping to find that bit of peace between who I am and what I do." It's all anyone us can do.