Living the Weeble Life
Aren’t they hideous?
Well, I got life-d again.
As in, life turned into madness for a while and threw me off my writing game. Off a lot of games, actually. And once again, I find myself starting over….not just with blogging, but with all my routines, both work and personal. And while I find this incredibly frustrating, it is starting to dawn on me that this is the way it is, life. Maybe it’s just an illusion that everyone else’s life stays steady while mine looks like the EKG of someone in a dubious state of cardiac health.
Maybe the interruptions, the starting over, are part of it. Maybe there’s a certain endurance exercise in this, the getting blown off course and finding a way to step back on, or in, again.
It reminds me of the many times I’ve attempted meditation and been told that it’s normal when your mind wanders, that the task is not to prevent that, because it’s not possible, but to rein it back in again when it inevitably drifts.
I was doing my morning pages this morning--the one thing I love most and still continue (off and on) from Julia Cameron’s book about creativity, The Artist’s Way—and I found myself writing about all of this and trying to recall what I have done in the past to return to life as I know it in these circumstances. The answer was that, after I beat myself up a little bit (trying to lose that habit) I pick myself up and throw myself into something I love, anew, or learning something new. It gives me hope and a sense of mission. And It’s a way of reminding myself that the world is always an interesting place, with lots to offer, and infinite opportunities for learning and growth are out there for me, if and when I choose them.
Years ago I took a small course offered by a psychic medium on the upper west side of Manhattan. I’d had a reading with her in which she told me something related to my brother and his death that no one could have known, and it left me with both a sense of peace and an enduring curiosity about what’s on the other side of life.
And as part of one conversation, she told the class that people on the other side who came to her who had committed suicide always regretted it, almost instantly. And she said something—and I’m not sure if this came from her or the voices of those who had passed on this way—that has always resonated with me: “It’s a privilege to be here.”
I think about that a lot when life, shall we say, intervenes.
And I also, I realized (also in the course of the morning pages), absorbed the same kind of message from my brother during his years in the hospital.
Life certainly knocked him off course, first when he was 9 and diagnosed with aplastic anemia and ended up in the bubble room at the hospital. And then over a series of events during the ensuing 8 ½ years—infections, plummeting blood counts, isolation, etc. etc. etc.
And yet he went on. He was not immune to being pissed off or upset. But he always got back up, so to speak, to play his guitar, to read (and often memorize) a book or poem, to write. I don’t know how he was able to summon that fortitude or wisdom, but he did. And I’m pretty grateful for his example right now.
For some reason the most inelegant image popped up in my head as I thought about this…the memory of a toy from my childhood (that I never owned)—Weebles. They were goofy, egg-shaped characters that didn’t fall over because they were weighted in the bottom. And they were constantly advertised on TV, with a catch-phrase so apparently ear-wormy that it’s still ringing in my ears all these years later: Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.
So, yeah, I guess I’m wobbling, but I’m still standing, and trying to get back on course…again.