Ten Thousand Hours

hello, stranger -

well what a difference a little bit of writing can make…  and if that's not my understatement for the year so far, i don't know what is.

i'm not sure where i was at with things the last time i reached out, but i can tell you their damned sight better since then. feels like the waves of good stuff have been rolling in pretty steadily lately – and even where they're not i’ve been too busy lowering my shoulder into whatever comes up next to really much notice anyways.

balance has begun to return to life - started eating better, working out, reading for fun again. breathing deeper and sleeping well. and i think it’s putting the pen to the paper again that underpins all of that.

or maybe it's a chicken and the egg type of thing, i don't know.  maybe it's more about how for any organism or any other sort of system to work properly as a whole, all of its parts need to be functioning and in sync. maybe when one thing goes missing everything else gets thrown off too.  maybe it doesn't matter.  all i know is that i woke up this past weekend and realized i left my journal at work, i didn’t really know what to do with myself. there was a weird sort of emptiness to it, so i had to go down there to get it just to start my day. not that i need it all the time, but when the urge arises to scratch out some ideas these days, i find I can't be without.

and when i looked back over my entries from the last few weeks i could see a real shift in my thinking. the results of the hard reset from the California trip. the way i watched the stress and the bad thoughts from my mind and across the page, with the same attached observation someone watches a thundercloud come and go - taken seriously enough, but with a dedicated sense of calm that comes with reminding oneself that the weather never lasts forever, and sometimes not even for very long.

compare that with the stuff i was putting down in my journals when I first washed up out here, what seems like a lifetime ago now. dear lord, those must stack two feet high at this point. i briefly thumbed through them the other day too, all the way back to the beginning, to my first flirtations of taking my own thoughts and words seriously – the words of someone at the very start of trying to sort it all out, of trying to unwrap a riddle with a million moving parts to it, and no idea what the solution looks like.

the handwriting was small and sharp and specific, and what i could sense as i skimmed through was that so was the mindset behind it. not that i mean to be too critical of who i was or where i was at at the time, but looking over those seemingly endless strings of words had all the appeal of trying to sort through a trashcan full of bent wire, or the scratch mark ramblings of someone trying to blindly claw their way out of some mud hut jail cell somewhere.

but hey, they say that it takes ten thousand hours to truly become a master of a craft, so at least maybe all that time was spent in pursuit of the fine art of learning how to cut through my own bullshit. ha, dare to dream!

maybe each one of those entries was like a single piece of straw in a birds nest, being pulled out and carried away and being let float off to the wind. maybe i had it backwards this whole time – maybe it was never about building something up, but rather tearing something down.  maybe that’s what it’s always been about.

or maybe i’m just as full of it now as i was back then, and in a few years i’ll look back and be feeling the same way.  wouldn’t that be great punchline… but i guess only time will tell.

in any case it's daybreak here and the sun has started to creep up into the sky. mornings can still be really nice this time of year, and i'm enjoying my time on the porch, feeling the cool air and watching the kittens tumble around with each other on the patio, as they try to figure out the world around them.

they’re quickly turning into little cats though, so i'll have to figure out a plan with them soon enough. add that to the list of about a thousand things ahead of me. but that's all right though, at least these days there doesn't seem to be much of a shortage of getting it done, and i guess that’s what matters most.

it's just that out here you gotta make sure you get it done in the shade. so before the sun gets too high i'm gonna say adios for now, and that i hope all is well with you on your end too.

i’ll be sure to write again soon, and until then be good.