ManicDDaily

Keeper?

As followers of this blog know, my summer has been difficult due to the loss of a close friend.  It’s shaken me.  Aside from the grief,  and, of course, the gap – the missing counselor–there’s the internal spotlight.  Could it happen to me?  (Yes.)    How would I feel?

This question of how I would feel is not aimed at the obvious, i.e. sick, terrified, probably nauseated, very very sad.  The question is how I would feel about how I lived my life?  What, in other words, would I regret?

The big regrets – for me at least—would be unkindness and unhappiness:  those times when I was needlessly unkind (and, frankly, it’s hard to come up with any instance in which unkindness was needful); those times when I was needlessly unhappy.

Again, “needless” may the wrong word—those times in which I was unhappier than circumstances warranted—unhappy because of kvetching, perfectionism, issues of control, jealousy, lack of appreciation.  (As in the case of unkindness, circumstances probably rarely warranted the unhappiness that I was able to come up with.)

Putting all that aside—admittedly a big that—another thing I’d regret very much is not allowing myself time to do my work, that is, my true work –the work that feels like my work.

I don’t mean my day job, (which, Boss, is a great job and one that I frequently genuinely enjoy).

I wouldn’t regret not doing profound work, or revolutionary work.  I’ve long ago accepted that I’m not a particularly profound person, and I try to keep a lid on the grandiosity.

I mean the silly children’s novels, silly teen and more adult novels, the slightly odd poems and prose poems, whatever little drawings come my way.  Being able to point to them as “done deals”, “keepers”—I would very much regret not having given myself the time to do that, or more of it.

So where does this blog come in?

It’s truly wonderful to have daily readers (thanks so much), and to get something out every day.  But I’m a person, like every single one of you, with limited time in life.

I am not, just yet, discontinuing the blog (though I’m not sure I will continue it on a daily basis).  But I do need to find a way to make it serve my general purposes a bit more.

Which means what?  Maybe posts that are more purely creative, or connected, or connectible, to bigger projects?  More draft poems?  Prose poems?  Writing exercises?  Novel excerpts?

What’s hard, of course, is that drafts can be a bit personal, raw, embarrassing,  and possibly uninteresting, certainly to random Internet browsers, who are much likely to be attracted by the names Robert Pattinson or Sarah Palin.  My task, I suppose, is to try to look on that part as liberating and not paralyzing.

(I hope you’ll stay with me while I figure this out.)