The Wonder Years

Ugh. My writing has suffered a considerable blow: it blows. I just deleted an entire paragraph of complete gibberish. It's as though I have nothing left to say, which seems improbable, yet, I'm unable to refute the fact. Surely I haven't already said everything I want to say. Surely there must be more. You'd think so. But surveying the barren landscape of my mind paints a very different picture. One without any happy little trees. Only smoldering desolation, nothingness, a vast expanse of absence. I look out for even the meekest sign of life, a mouse or a gnat, but I find nothing. Not even the smoke dances. The mountains are meager and unimpressive. The sky, colorless. Where did my creativity wander away to? It's odd. 

I'm hoping I'll find something to revitalize me, maybe at Burning Man. If I can't find it there, I doubt I'll find it anywhere. It is a place of possibility, if nothing else. Too often the tedium of everyday life strips away the magical, the marvelous, and leaves us instead with a gray, stale, shapeless lump of play-doh that doesn't even smell like play-doh anymore. It's important to remember that sameness is an illusion. As you age, it becomes increasingly more difficult to embrace - and to hold onto - wonder. It's claimed by the years. 

Earlier tonight I met a friend I haven't seen in years. We spoke of big ideas, asking questions we both knew there weren't any answers to, ruminating on the nature of fear and love, truth and beliefs. Life is a struggle for peace, which, once attained, we call happiness. Warmth, reflection, empathy - toward ourselves, as well as others - and the confrontation of fears all move us in this direction. They are developmental. These are things we must practice daily - and fail at - to maintain fitness and ensure a sort of spiritual agility. Once we become too sedentary, in our hearts or our minds, once we lose a sense of challenge, replacing it with complacency and idle comfort, we lose our place. We stop growing. We begin to wither and wilt and recede, defeated, desolated. On our faces we wear all the pained misery we'd hoped all our lives we might avoid. But there must be a way out, right? A way to overcome? And there is. 

Try.