Dithering in the dilly-dally
In the last week or so, I seem to have lost something. The words I use to describe my life at the moment run from feeling trapped or having no place to stand or feeling like I have no viewpoint. It’s a type of freefall, though I am not falling at all, I am hanging. The chair is suspended in mid-air. I am tied to it. Every hour or two or every 18 or 113 minutes – my experience of it is random – the chair pivots and at each turn whatever my view is at that moment is the absolute truth, until the chair turns again, and the views get all mixed up in my mind.
It’s impossible to live without a hypothesis, without a point of view. Try it, try losing who you are in emotion and its source and look at your life and your reactions to it and pretend that your reactions all stem from your past. Then change it up and pretend that your reactions are totally about the moment. Briefly see the truth of both sides, of the melding, and sit, paralyzed in your chair as it twists this way and that.
It’s all so obtuse, gentle reader, or so it feels as I try to explain without really getting into the nitty-gritty of it. I need to find the path again, to move forward, to jettison the chair. I either move forward on my own or with a companion, with a posse even. I’m getting impatient, having lived with ambiguity for months now. My world feels like it is shrinking, that my options are few, and while so much of it is sweet and right and smooth as whipped butter, something vital is missing.
Is the missing piece within me, the answer in my heart? Do I need to work harder at creating this piece in my current context? Is there something I can do with my life to bring the piece to me?
Frankly, I’m tired of the dithering and dilly-dallying and the thinking about this. It’s the type of exhaustion that leads to something rash, the packing of a satchel and taking to the rails, the slow melt into an unmade bed. These are easy, relatively, and don’t require the assistance of others. My chest is tight and my heart moves from here to there and they tell me to quit it with all of this ambiguity, to clean the windows of my mind and sweep the floors and just fucking get on with it. But I’m not the only one in this game, I am responsible for others, I don’t want to do anything rash and so I do what feels like nothing at all.
Determination is easy if your mind is clear, if the consequences seem less dire, if it feels like you aren’t in the middle of a choice about so many different things, if you trust your own mind.
From the prompt "I am determined."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Images of spinning chair by me.