I wish I had something brilliant to say. I would dearly love to write words that would make you contemplate the impossible, the inevitable. Words that would make the light leak in and shine on a spot that you have never quite seen before.
My dream is to write you into an aha! moment.
Every week, I search for something that I feel is profound or moving. Something that might be new or inspiring. But this week, I have run out of steam. My desire to power through is still coursing through me enough that I am sitting here, writing this when I just want to be sleeping.
Then again, I pretty much always want to be sleeping. When you sleep as little as I do, it is difficult not to feel the desire to sleep as some continuous inner heart beat. A desire so strong and overwhelming that it overshadows even the most lovely moments with an incessant need for rest.
But, I don’t want to write about sleep. Or not sleeping. The truth is that it doesn’t help and it isn’t fun or profound. There is nothing magical or inspiring about insomnia.
If I’m going to scatter a few words here, just so that I can say that I managed to write my blog, I want them at the very least to be fun.
The older I get, the more I think fun is ridiculously underrated. It doesn’t have to be a stereotypical idea of fun (no roller coasters or all night drinking required), but doing something that induces, laughter, smiles and warm feelings just makes life better.
Having fun at least once a week makes you 39% less likely to be an asshole. If you couple that with laughing at least twice a day, you are 76% more likely to live a happy life.
Of course, all of that is complete bullshit, but that’s part of my idea of fun!
If you are still reading this random jumble of half-connected thoughts, you might be wondering why I don’t just give up and go to bed. I think there are at least two reasons. First, I really like to write, and I don’t want my insomnia to take that away from me. Throughout the last two years (ok, going on three years), I have had times when I couldn’t really write at all, times when my mind felt like a waste land of fragmented thoughts and broken down letters. It was desolate and lonely and I don’t want to go back there.
Also, I have a thing about being consistent and reliable. It’s Tuesday, I said I would put out a blog every Tuesday. I didn’t say I might put out a blog on Tuesdays, or that I would probably blog on Tuesdays. I said I WOULD do it and so, here I am, doing it.
I will end here, with my favourite words that I’ve ever written. Words that I wrote in grade 7 as part of the first book I ever wrote (a book that was sadly destroyed in a computer malfunction nearly 30 years ago). These words are like a comfy sweater that never quite wears out. They are somehow soothing, they bring me back to when I first read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and first realized that there was room for the fantastic, majestic and ridiculous in life. Reading and writing meant that there was room for everything.
Inwards, outwards, backwards, forwards, round and round chasing the tails of yesterday while trying to grasp tomorrow. That’s life. It’s a game, a play and each person is several people, in several times trying to forget what they can’t remember of times better forgotten.
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