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PETS AND LESS IMPORTANT THINGS

WEbsite of the Derek Leif who lives in Beverly Massachusetts

(Not to be confused with the other two derek leifs on facebook, one of whom lives in colorado, and the other of whom lives in NEbraska)

ESSAY-AT THIS MOMENT, I SLOG

4/6/2018

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At the moment, for a number of reasons that I will not get into, life is a slog.

It’s tough when life is a slog. Words don’t come as easily as they usually do. Ideas don’t come easily, either.

During such moments, I’m reminded of the time I was in the hospital with appendicitis.

I’ve always thought that it’s a blessing that we can’t completely remember physical pain. Though we can say “I was in a lost of pain,” we can’t specifically feel the pain we were in when we remember that moment. This is a good thing; if we did, we’d probably lose our minds.

Anyway, when I was in the hospital with appendicitis, I remember the doctor saying to me “well, you seem to have all the symptoms. Just to make sure about nausea, which I have to check off…I take it that the notion of a pepperoni pizza doesn’t appeal to you now, right?”

I laughed, but boy, was he right. At that moment, I thought that I would never, ever be hungry again.

Yet right now, try as I might, I simply can’t feel that way. At the moment, I am hungry, and looking forward to dinner.

So it is when life is a slog. Right now, I know, rationally, that there will come a point in the future where I will not feel as if my mind is encased in cement. I will not feel as if my thoughts are a watch encased in glue.

Yet right now, I simply can’t believe that I will ever again feel anything else but this complete and utter paralysis.

This is one of those days where I check the word count of this piece of writing and simply cannot imagine how I will come up with another 200 words so that I can say that I posted a 500 word essay. I know that there are words that I can write—my rational mind tells me this—but in my soul, it simply feels as if this is not going to happen.

Okay, let me change that a bit. Yes, I suppose that I can muster enough feeling to believe that I will actually write 200 words (actually, it’s closer to 120 at this point), but I simply cannot believe that the words that I write will have any real value whatsoever.

In fact, I cannot believe, at this moment, that I will ever again write anything that is worth reading. I cannot believe that there will actually be a moment in which life that will feel like anything other than this muddy, grim, epic slog through wet sand.

So what I just do right now is embrace this feeling, and put one foot in front of the other. Like Humphrey Bogart in “The African Queen,” pulling his boat through a leech infested swamp, I trudge forward. Rational thought tells me that eventually I will be out of this swamp; every other fiber of my being tells me that this is my new home.

This is just where I am at this moment. The whole thing could change at, well, a moment’s notice. It seems impossible that this is so, yet my mind says it is: this too shall pass.

In the meantime…just one foot in front of the other.
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