An Object at Rest

? On the very positive side of “why this writing space gets no love” of late, as I wrote recently on Substack, the coming of spring and summer has been liberating! The landscape beyond beckons me through the sliding doors, first cup of coffee in hand, in the indigo of the cool pre-crepuscular morning. I sit at my computer less when the garden and the porch require my full attention.

But more importantly, I think, is the feeling, the hope, the tentative realization that the community we have been part of for so long–the one that ceased to be actively alive for me during the Covid years–has returned! How do I know?

I give you Exhibit A: We have attended four pot-luck or otherwise planned-with-friends meals in the past seven days. My dance card is pleasantly fuller than it has been since fall of 2019. It is wonderful. It is exhausting. The interactions–each one has a story–a story, at least worth telling to myself. I do not write. But then, left-over keystrokes to share with others are few, and the minutes here in my chair with a clear-ish head, even fewer.

On the less positive side to explain my low follow-through with writing here: our age peers are either increasingly ill of mind or body, or are in the motions of or expressing their near-future intentions to transmorgrify into the “continuum of care” , more often than not, near their children. The boomers we grew up with are soon out-migrating to “The Home” in one sense or another.

These inconvenient truths, in turn, move me away from my happy place from which I have preferred to write. Intimations of mortality at every turn makes me feel less bullish on the future, less prone to invest in thinking–and writing–into the very indeterminate block of time.

So I am in an eddy of sorts. The seas are not calm; the sails are far from slack. I am NOT at rest. But I guess the important part is that the ship remains afloat. And after that, I can dog-paddle and look for flotsam. A distant shore would be too much to expect in this life, and yet…?