02/2013

“The human life is made up of choices, yes or no, in or out, up or down.And there are the choices that matter.Love or Hate.To be a hero or a coward.To fight or give in.To live or die.To live or die, that’s the important choice, and sometimes it’s not always in our hands.”

Solar eclipse, as seen from Earth’s orbit

If you know yourself, then you’ll not be harmed by what is said about you.

I spend seven or eight hours… each time I try to write. Most of that time is spent stalling, which means that for every seven or eight hours I spend pretending to write - sitting in the writing position, looking at a screen - I get, on average, one hour of actual work done. It’s a terrible, unconscionable ratio. This kind of life is at odds with the romantic notions I once had, and most people have, of the writing life. We imagine more movement, somehow. We imagine it on horseback. Camelback? We imagine convertibles, windswept cliffs, lighthouses. We don’t imagine - or I didn’t imagine - quite so much sitting. I know it makes me sound pretty naive, that I would expect to be writing while, say, skiing. But still. The utterly sedentary nature of this task gets to me every day.

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern. The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey. It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.

There is nothing to fix, nothing to do, nothing needs to be better, nicer, or in a certain way, all that stuff is just thoughts, there’s no need to take any interest in it. How things are is just fine. Rest. Rest on the inside.