*I am trying something different and exploring writing in a stream of consciousness style in third person omniscient point of view. I'll be curious to hear what you think of the style. It's just an experiment, but I am enjoying it.
Morning Inertia
Each morning as she makes her way down the back staircase to the sunrise peace of the living room, she wonders whether she will be able to get at it today. What “it” is she can hardly say, but it is something just out of reach. Novalis’ blue flower. Gatsby’s green light. She knows it has to do with purpose, some essential thing she is meant to do, and she has been beating around it. She has had encounters with it. But she has not yet apprehended it.
Priorities are always a challenge. There is the family. And it’s always hard to know how much to give of yourself to your adolescent children while asking that they too “do their bit” and contribute towards the household’s smooth flowing. How much is too much to ask? How much space is too much to require? How much time for her own thinking and writing is indulgent and how much necessary? It is exhausting to consider, and she tires of it.
She finds that her life has grown complicated with too many spheres of commitment bubbling beside each other in the pot of her adulthood, each requiring attention and each threatening to burst some membrane of sanity if not properly attended to in a timely fashion. These demands: familial, social, career-related prevent a stillness, a calmness. Too much is always on the boil, and she’s so busy preventing a seething, messy overflow, she can never get below into the delicious depths of real living. Surface skimming is all that seems available to her. But she yearns for more.
In the dawn light, she sits on the navy velvet couch and stares off into space. She should journal or properly write or pray. But her mind is a muddle of thwarted desires, “shoulds,” and “musts,” and she is paralyzed to do anything but blink and try to pull the thread. Which thread will unravel the answer to so much confusion and dissatisfaction? She tugs at a few different mental threads, trying them out, but as they begin to unravel, they catch upon others, and soon she’s left with a jumble: a ball of multi-colored thread and no order. It is all too complicated, she thinks. This is the problem of modern life. Simplicity is just about impossible. And society makes an idol out of multi-tasking, busyness, and a full calendar. It is hard to invest in modern relationships or work without being drawn into other complicated lifestyles. Scheduling is a headache. Competing needs for connection and solitude war within her every day.
If only she could excuse herself from all the entanglements to see her way clear. Step outside what feels like a locomotive on a track going who knows where and, she’s certain, to no place she’s meant to be. But how do you plan and execute such a reprieve, such an audacious escape without hurting or disappointing those you care about? How do you avoid selfishness while trying to tend to the self and one’s own inner landscape and vision? She wishes she knew how to simultaneously please, serve, and complete her life’s work. But instead it feels as though, whatever her life’s work is, it is daily put on hold while she tends to the needs and desires of others and the demands of job and home. She is not unhappy, but she is unsettled. And she senses strongly that there is more for her to do than what she’s experiencing.
*** This is just a beginning, a playing around attempt with the style and voice. I'd value your thoughts. Thanks for reading.