Reprise

Evidently I have gone from writing once a quarter to writing once a year. But when my mind feels dangerously close to slipping into silent and belligerent oblivion, and my heart feels lost and empty, there is nothing else that I know of which can awaken them, if only to remember what sent them into their shells.

Perhaps some people are more in tune with their inner lives so they can escape from their real ones. Perhaps they need that escape because they, unlike other people, are not equipped to hold their thoughts back.

I feel like the inner me is slipping away. Slowly, reluctantly, with more than the occasional attempt to cling, to manifest itself, sometimes at the most inappropriate times. It is strong-willed, but does not know strength. It is knowing, but does not know wisdom. It is what is driving me, after almost a week now of doing nothing but shuffle about silently (usually with a cup of coffee in my hand) from one place in my place of work to another, to visit my blog after what seems like an eternity, and attempt to have a civil conversation with that inner self.

It is uncanny though, how I can only write at times when things are at the crease between utter calm and impending change. It is even more strange that things in my life almost always seem to be, usually because I make sure they are. I'm beginning to believe that that is the only way I can live - on a bridge.

I should not try to make them flow. My thoughts are disjointed because they are here, out of the gently simmering cauldron that is the mind, after a long time, they deserve to fight with one another to be the first to come out, even if they are not familiar to the ones they came before them.. Their agitation is warranted, as is their unfamiliarity once they actually find themselves on the brink of being expressed. I should not try to discipline them, not now, when I have given them a glimpse of what they are capable of being.

I read in a book recently that the Word is God. Because, the author contends, once the word is spoken, it exists. Surer than anything in the world. And as many authors before him have written, and will write, that it cannot be taken back. A Thought is like that too, except they don't believe in such dramatic things as entering the world with a declaration of irreversibility. A lesser God, if you will. They sometimes are, sometimes aren't, they are fluid, meandering from one place to another, one state of being to another. But, like the word, a thought, however ephemeral, changes the universe forever. Everything is a little bit to the left of where it was, some things, more so.

Maybe that is why people hold back thoughts. Maybe they are afraid that if everything is a little bit to the left, then they might not know where they are. Maybe they are afraid that they may lose their way ever so often on the paths they take everyday towards the different things they do. Maybe they wouldn't be able to discern any paths at all. Uncertainty is frighening when you confront it.

Maybe some people don't worry very much about holding back their thoughts, because they know, or think (I am inclined to think that the difference between those two determines who is mad and who is not) that they can find their way around. Or at least are prepared to take the chance.

Even when I'm saying these things, I know that they are a hopeless generalization of mental states of being, because everyone is one or the other way at one time or another. When they are one way, they do not the other. When they bring a thought into being, they are not simultaneously juggling with holding it back. And when they decide not to think a thought, they don't entirely know what that thought is.

They will know it when they are I think I mean that perhaps perhaps some people are both, at all times. Their thoughts are in a state of limbo, completely formed, ready to be, and so they have already fulfilled their purpose by moving everything in the universe a little bit to the left, yet struggling with the possibility of returning to where they came from. So that everyone is spared the temporary but still disconcerting effort of feeling their way around.

Where did I start?

The blessing and the bane of living on a bridge - I sometimes fails to remember which bridge I began with and which I am on now. Or maybe the one bridge is enough - half of all the thoughts there are on one side, and the other half on another. Because every thought has a twin. The way of the Gemini.

That last one is a stretch, but I think I can let myself go this time. A small price to pay to have established a tentative, but unmistakable connection with me.