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.
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.
