My lack of interest in writing can mean one of two things; I’m content and do not feel the need, or I’m suppressing.

I believe it’s the former, and personal history will back up the decades I was too busy, tired, or happy to write.

Yet, not writing, from the point of view of a discipline, distresses my psyche.

I know there are ‘shoulds‘ here:

A writer should write

If I care about my blog and followers I should  be posting

I should have something of worth to say

And yet, without the voice in my head telling me what I should want, I do not want to write. Not on a continual, scheduled basis.

There are areas of my life in flux and said flux causes anxiety. I am a magical thinker, and a positive thinker. When life drops uncertainty on to the grey matter of my brain (which it inevitably does), it’s like nerve endings in electric sockets. Shocking, annoying, provoking, jolting, uncomfortable. I like to believe I have answers, I like to believe I’m in control.

Surprise!

No, wake up call.

Yesterday – with a wind and rain storm keeping me dutifully inside – I am given continual reminders about staying exactly where I am in time, in the present.

Reminder Number One: I am on the phone with a friend of 40+ years and we are discussing transitions that we are facing. We discuss happiness, pain, stories that have endured as long as we have, how to let go, how (or if) we can forgive. The end result we reach is that staying in the present – not the past that is gone or the future that hasn’t happened yet – helps our anxiety subside.

Reminder Number Two: Facebook sends me a blog post that I’d written in March of 2014. Of course I can no longer locate it so I cannot insert a link, but it was all about what we had been discussing. There is nothing new about this conversation or its component parts, Aristotle, too, wondered.

Reminder Number Three: I pick up a magazine that I’d gotten halfway through and turn to an article by Miuccia Prada. “Crises are always positive because they force you to think,” says Miuccia Prada, reflecting on Italy’s political and economic woes. “You redesign reality. When everything is going well, people get lazy!” Yep.

Reminder Number Four: I turn on the television and for three minutes I watch ‘The Talk’. In those few minutes someone says, “God bless the broken road, because that’s how we grow. When things aren’t going as we want, the universe isn’t giving us a hard time – no – it’s giving us a heads up to change the thoughts and decisions that got us to this point in the first place so that we can move on.” Hello, world.

Reminder Number Five: I am reading a book titled, the untethered soul, the journey beyond yourself  by Michael Singer. It speaks to me on so many levels that by the time I finished the first chapter I vowed to read it again and again. It is about consciousness, and that voice in our heads that never shuts up. It is about staying open, not closing off, even when something that we perceive as bad is happening. Relax and release, he says.

Reminder Number Five: My youngest son drops by to have dinner before heading out to a weekend bachelor party. We eat and laugh and remain squarely in each moment. Not only is it exactly where I want to be, but it is exactly what it is; son and mom enjoying time together. I am acutely aware that all present realities are not sunny, but they are all we have. So my lesson is to remain in them, no matter what my judgments of them are, because they too will pass.