Days like this one, when melancholy winds blow through me, I cannot help but yearn for a way to express my perceived isolation and loneliness. I feel like a disgruntled author at this moment. I am creating a work of fiction - somewhere between novella and novel - and I am waking up early each weekday morning to spend about 45 minutes to an hour working on it before I prepare myself and my daughter for work and school, respectively. This early rising is new for me, but I made the choice to do it because work and home responsibilities leave me very little time throughout the rest of the day to focus on my passion for writing. I realized I had to make the time to follow my dream, and stop procrastinating and feeling victimized by circumstances.
Before I began consciously creating this quiet time for myself to work on the current narrative that is challenging my imagination, I wrote sporadically, and, the contradictory result was that Life provided me, during seemingly unconnected and unsuspecting moments, with a plethora of observations and ideas that have been essential to character and plot development within the story, all of which produced within me the lovely experience of flow: the story was, quite literally, writing itself. Yet, now that I have set out to bring a structure to my writing process, I find myself struggling to take the story where I thought it was going. Discovering the best words to combine for the precise conveyance of form and meaning in order to complete just one sentence has left me feeling suffocated and spent.
I suspect the mental blocks that have recently been erected in my mind to stymie the smooth flow of narrative I experienced early in the creation of this fiction is due to the "sacrificed" sleep that needles me in the back of all my thoughts. It appears that sleeping less inspires my mind to push harder to be productive so that it will not view the time it could spend sleeping as wasted. What a lame point of view this is, and yet, I cannot deny that it seems to be the case with me now.
So now, after a morning such as this one past, in which I barely had three words to add to the piece, I sit at work and obsess over this "wasted" morning I entered before the light entered the house, and I experience being a nervous wreck. I stumble around in my mind searching desperately for a rationale that will prove to me that what I am doing is meaningful, that I have the ability to do this, that I should not doubt my chosen purpose to be an author. However, all I discover are the ashes of dreams burnt up in the flames of the fires of Self doubt. Yes, that's right: Self, with a capital S, doubt.
This is the Truth that my mind contends is a lie. Yet, perceiving it as a lie gives birth the pain I feel now. In the moments I discover my shaky self-confidence trampled upon by the stampeding herd of lacking thoughts, I notice a still Light shining in the distance of my inner-world, but I distrust Its Power to save me, to renew me, to reveal me to myself, to stand me up in the midst of the blind rush of fear that knocked me off my feet and challenge me to behold the absurdity of the delusion of substantiality I attributed to these monstrous beasts of burden who I now observe pass right through my form. From the darkness of my present position in the mud of my mind, that Light is menacing! Rather than stepping into that Light, I grab onto one of the panicked beasties and hope that it is scrambling to a place that will be my sanctuary from the empty despair of being crushed by the mad herd of which the beast I embrace is a part. There is no shirking the implications of this insane flight from the welcoming Light: I doubt God.
I must tell you this is a very humbling confession to make. To admit that you do not surrender to the Grace, Power, and Love of God - of your Self with a capital S - with the knowledge that all suffering has already been redeemed even while you wallow in it is tantamount to asserting that God can fail. I have expressed - not essentially, but quite literally - with this admission of doubt my belief that my problems, my pains, my hurts, my fears, my negativities are greater than Me - are greater than God. Going through my days, trying to stay awake to Reality, claiming to have faith that all is at it should be all while coveting - beneath the mental chatter that put me through the motions of appearing to be a conscious human being - my smoldering identity as a being beyond the healing powers of the Breath of All Life. Indeed, my mental image of being an awakening human being hid and protected this parasitic doubter of Self.
A desolate idea (shifting places and changing faces within me so as to evade recognition) of the incompetence of God becomes me and leads me to roaring rapids of fear and isolation and despair. I jump into the chaos with it because it is me. I drown in this river of self-pity that is itself a creation of this idea that my problems are too serious, too important, too heavy for God to bear. I am a hypocrite.
Who just told me this? What saw this Truth for me? Was it the pathetic me who marches again and again, alone, to the guillotine? Can this sad version of me have come to such a grand understanding of the smallness I am choosing in this moment? Or are You feeding me this Wisdom intravenously through my Soul, nourishing my withering heart through the revelation of the anchor I still cling to at the bottom of the sea of Life?
What is this Love that lifts me up when my thoughts and actions hate Its manifestations? What is this Truth that has compassion on a liar? What is this Peace that embraces my chaotic mind? What is this Success that is experienced during moments of failure? What is this God that never abandons Its deserters?
Let me never again believe there is any possible way to stray from You. Let me recognize You in the darkest alleys of my mind and around the sharpest corners of my emotions. Let me see You in the moment before I know You are there. Let me be the blank slate on which You paint Your Masterpiece. Together, We cannot fail.
