starting over

There comes a time (or many times) in every journey when you lose your way. The words you’ve lived by seem hollow, and all the teachings you’ve absorbed and tried to follow seem to have left you in a place you don’t recognize. It isn’t the destination you dreamed of when you started out, and you don’t know where you are and you are resentful at all the effort you put into getting there.

We all want the path to lead us to the answers, and we think we know what those answers should be.

But it wouldn’t be a “path” if it worked like that.

This winter and spring, I haven’t been writing. I will journal, but when it comes to blogging, I just don’t want to. I find myself craving a life away from blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and everything else “social”. I unsubscribed from things left and right. Something about this social web makes me feel very antisocial. It seems full of acquaintances, and lacking in the deeper friendships I enjoy. There are transient exciting connections, but they pass and then it feels hollow.

I tell myself I’m not a social-butterfly sort of person – but that hides something else. I am not writing.

But I didn’t start my blog to get friends. That sort of purpose crept over and infected me. The ideas of friends and fortune, being “internet famous”…but that’s not why I started writing. I just wanted to record some of my thoughts. Whatever someone else got out of them was their business.

So I want to start over.

I don’t want to try anymore, to write the words I think are wise. I want to start where I’m at. I want to write what seems to be real to me, and anything else is someone else’s deal.

I have been wanting to get away from this subtle expectation I feel emanating from my blogs. The fact that there are datestamps on each post gives this sense of expectancy, like “Where is the next one…?”. I feel like a grumpy rat on a misbehaving wheel, trying to create wisdom on the spot. I turn away and want to live a life away from public eyes.

Not that my blogs are especially widely read. Not that fans are clamoring for my attention. But somehow it still affects me. I have poor blog-boundaries.

What it feels like inside is this pressure to produce. What I end up doing is writing nothing. I have nothing to say. Go find your own wisdom. I am tapped out. What do I know?

So I want to start over. What do I know? What have I said before, that now I’ve forgotten?

I’m sure I’ve said something like…

Creativity does not come from within us, it comes through us. We have to be willing to be a channel.

I wonder if there is a correlary. I wonder if we have to be willing to not be a channel. For it to not happen, for that not to matter.

Honestly, I don’t know. I have not been writing because everything I write seems to be absurd and stupid. I really don’t know where all those good ideas went.

It might look, perhaps, like a crisis of faith, but I do still have a great deal of faith. I believe that life is a bunch of cycles, and right now, I’m in one that I don’t understand. And probably won’t until it shifts. I keep wanting to be in a different place with it, but I’m not. I’m just here, not sure where “here” is.

Back when I was doing Liberty, they would say to “get willing”. It doesn’t matter what you think you are getting willing about, it matters that you get willing without knowing what it is about.

So OK. I’m willing. I’m willing to be here, in this spot, where I have these three blogs that I don’t feel like writing on, and all these ideas about what that means and all these desires to be in a different spot, a more productive, overflowing spot. A better-looking spot. A spot I would approve of more. A spot I would feel smugly satisfied about. A spot that would feel exciting and daring, and impress people.

I do have faith. I have been through enough transformative experiences that I do know that wherever I am, I will be somewhere else soon enough. Just not as soon as I’d like.

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