Friday, May 28, 2010

Frustration

I have too much going on in my head. Too many goals that I'd like to accomplish. Too many thoughts. Sometimes it's hard for me to focus. Sometimes I forget what I want to do. Sometimes I forget ideas that I had two minutes earlier.

Right now I can't quiet my mind. It's running around itself like a rat in an M.C. Escher maze. I'm not even sure what I'm thinking about. Or maybe I'm thinking too many things.

Fence. Garden. Water. Table. Poem. Story. Eye. Write. Walk. Heartbeat. Breathe. Weeds. Flowers. Kitchen. Curtain. Paint. Workshop. Journal. Class. Article. Car. Oil change. Oil spill. Morning glory seeds. Marigolds. Pinestraw. Laundry. Grad school. Education.

Really it's this wildly overgrown to do list. Or a list of worries. Fears. Hopes. I'm not sure exactly. But it's something that keeps me awake. It makes me chest tight and my breath hard to come by.

And then I get angry because I remember times - even some recent times - when I read long books about atoms and anthropologists, when I appreciated poems by Pacheco and Neruda, when I listened to Waits and Fitzgerald, when I made pizza dough from scratch and thought about the origins of music, and it makes me feel more frustrated with where I am now.

Even this. I hate writing this kind of thing. I'd much rather write about daffodils and grandmother's pincushions, but I can't get past this cataract in my head. My mind feels lost in this whirlpool of thoughts...mostly unimportant ones. Trivial, stupid thoughts.

Well, this probably isn't the best time to write, but I vowed that regardless of anything else, I'd write every day from now on. And I can't write dishonestly, despite the fact that I can make up huge whoppers to tell my students, like the one about the teacher who died in my classroom 28 years ago and still haunts it or like how we hire elephants and giraffes for teachers to ride when the circus is in town on work days.

1 comment:

  1. "What a liberation to realize that the “voice in my head” is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that."
    — Eckhart Tolle

    ReplyDelete

 
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A Mirror, A Summer, A Street by Autumn Crisp is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.