Boy howdy, time sure does slip by, I tell ya. It’s amazing that you even stop by here to see if I’ve written anything anymore. I don’t blame those who’ve thrown up their hands in frustration and figured they may as well stop checking this blog. Well, what can I say?
I’ve just been coasting along, and days turn into weeks, which turn into months, and here it is almost Christmas when last time I remember looking up, I was answering the door for some trick-or-treaters. And it seems all the worse this time of year, when I leave home in the dark of the early morning and return home in the dark of the early evening. The sunshine goes unnoticed, as I lose those precious hours to the buzzing office fluorescents, ringing telephones, and 2-way radio chatter. This time of year especially, I feel that my day consists of the morning fight with the snooze button, a shower, work, dinner, and falling asleep to the 10 o’clock news. There are highlights in between those landmarks – a few spare minutes to play my guitar, crawling around and stacking blocks on the floor with my son, conversations with Nicole, Sunday worship… Those are the brief, bright moments without which I would go completely mad.
So I’m thinking back to when I was in my 20's, specifically my mid-20's: Nary a dull moment in those days, lemme tell ya. I played in 3 bands, I played solo acoustic sets, and I was a regular at a couple local pubs. It was a rare weekend that I didn’t have to play, and on those rare weekends, I was out watching friends play. Those solo acoustic sets were generally weeknight gigs. I rounded out the rest of the week by hanging out with the other regulars at the pubs that became the foundation of my social identity, smoking cigarettes and drinking far too many beers & shots until closing time, and sometimes even later. I typically operated on 3-4 hours of sleep, and somehow managed to keep that pace for about 4 years. Yikes. It’s amazing I’m still alive to write about this. Seriously. And even more amazing that I encountered the police only 2 times – once for smoking pot behind a comedy club with some musician friends, and once for driving while nearly legally intoxicated (I blew 0.08, back when legally drunk was 0.10). Those are not glory days for me. Those are days I consider to have been reckless, dangerous to myself and others. But the strange truth is that I was never hurting for inspiration. Those were days were full, if foolish, and I never found myself wishing I had more time in the day.
So now that I’m considering this, I wonder just what I’m supposed to be doing. I mean, I was spared prison (I coulda killed someone on one of those drunken treks home), injury or death throughout several years of very risky behavior, and here I am now, feeling like the axel on a hamster wheel. I certainly haven’t been continually granted my life and freedom so that I can fall into an uninspired pattern of living that puts my creative energy into such a holding pattern that it falls into stagnancy. Certainly not, I hope. But why has my music room, the place I set up to indulge my creativity, fallen into ruin, becoming little more than a storage area for my stuff? Why do so many of my plans and intentions fall into the hole I’ve labeled “Not Enough Time?” I don't know.
These are big things to consider, so forgive me for leaving this open-ended.
I think many people our age fall into this pit. Life takes over, Family take priority, new priorities come to the fore, and we lose connection with the precious things that have always resided deep within us, that give form to the deepest part of our identity, the deepest part of our souls. It becomes a struggle to stay in touch with that part of ourselves, and you have to wonder if that's part of the bigger lesson? I could go on, but pretty soon I'll have my own blog post in your comments, and I don't think you'll appreciate it. Maybe I'll write about it in my own...
Posted by: Crissy | April 06, 2006 at 02:57 PM