New Pages

And yet again we are at the beginning of a new year, or of even more weight, a new decade, a blank ream of pages waiting to be written. And, yet again, writer's block. Not the kind that keeps one from writing that story or novel or even something as simple as a short scrawl in the journal or diary.

Got plenty of that kind, too, thanks.

No, this is the kind of writer's block that feels like life isn't being lived. The owner of that life, the hopeful author of days to come, finds himself, pen in hand, ready to go, but cannot get that first line or sentence or paragraph down on the paper; they just can't seem to get on with writing the damned story.

Writer's block is a perfect more-than-metaphor for those of us idling in our life routines. We seem ready to break new ground, but cannot for the life of us sort out how to get our fingers moving on that keyboard or pushing the pen across that vast, unmarked expanse.

Notice how I shifted gears from the generalized "keeps one from writing" to the more specific "those of us stuck"? What, you thought I was preaching?

Naw, at least not to anyone else. If I am at all it's just to myself, and even that with only a mixed mood of exasperation and being amused by it all. Y'all have got your own chunks of "new" life to pick up here at this convenient calendar milepost, and I'm sure you're doing fine. So am I, if it gets to that.

I suspect, in fact, that being reasonably content with my life at the moment is a major factor in my inability to get off the dime and do something else. The point of motion for motion's sake seems rather more hazy than has always been the case in previous years' starting lines. I'm just bemused as to how to go about being "fine" in a new direction. Less clear is whether I need to consider a new direction at all, although it seems like I ought to be pretty sure that I ought to but I'm not sure of that.

That last sentence makes sense.

But, remembering all the new directions, turns, and diversions of my life thus far, the lesson I seem to be learning is that it's a lot of hard work and often as not hurts like a bitch. For what may well be the first time ever, I'm hard pressed to see where I would be going that's better than where I am. Or perhaps for the first time, I'm suddenly aware of the costs life imposes on new adventures, and beginning to realize that sometimes it's not worth it.  Maybe "better" isn't the thing. Just "different". Or maybe it's all a young man's game, someone who has the energy to start hacking a new path through unexplored jungle, just 'cause that's what we're supposed to do. Is that an American thing, or a Western thing, this vague discontent with here and now, that urge to keep moving toward some ill- or non-defined place?

I think I'm as interested in where that new path goes as I ever was, but am less interested in the actual work and pain involved in scratching that itch of curiosity or drive for novelty. Is the norm for me now the worn paths of habits ground into this little chunk of life I've settled? And is that a bad thing?

How different is the daily routine between the wild animal who makes his circuit every day on the same forested paths and ways of his "natural" home and the tiger who has worn a path down to dirt pacing the limits of his zoo habitat? One could say that the wild animal is free because he can always do something else, somewhere else. But if he lives and dies on those ancestral tracks, which almost all of us seem to wind up doing sooner or later, is he so different from the zoo animal who lives his life snuffling from one end of the cage to the other? If they took the bars away, and the animals never get around to going anywhere else, are they still counted as free?

And, thus I hover, pen over paper, waiting for me to do…something…while I instead doodle here in the margins. I will probably do something, you know, large or small. I'm vaguely curious to find out what it will be, and some small but not insignificant and much less sanguine part of me is impatient to get off my ass and get on with it. But everything in its time, I suppose.