Crossroads

I'm doing a supply run today + taking care of everything else outside of the dayjob. I'm taking a day off because last week was a bit too many hours gobbled up by work and a bit too many things of life fallen on the wayside. Hence I'm retracing a few steps back to retrieve the fallen and get them back on the main track.  

As part of deliberately shaping my days towards the kind of life and living that I want, I'm practicing being more responsive to the nonchalantly assuming demands of the dayjob. I push back a little bit more each time. Reclaiming time and energy and the right to simply be and become what I am.

The pandemic has given me a very helpful gift. It gave me a context of fragility within which I have become more conscious of "why not now?" With everything literally disrupted and forced to stay in a state of indefinite irregularity, all bets are off. Whatever I had been planning and preparing for are no longer applicable to the situation. All my visualisations have to begin first with the assumption that a vaccine would have been developed.

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible. (Doris Lessing)

All the rules and all the defaults have become wobbly in the face of heightened uncertainty. We do what we can while on high alert for any emergency -- not just of getting sick, but of losing jobs, losing access to necessities, of resources for aid drying up as the strain of prolonged need for help exhausts even the most generous among us.

We have tightened our belts, so to speak, in all aspects of our lives. For myself I have conserved spaces in my head to protect my mental health, closed off areas I couldn't feed, put them to temporary sleep while I seek for alternative paths to a refuge. I have begun to grow a garden to grow a portal into somewhere, somewhen, somehow else.

It is only too easy to let myself be swallowed up by the practical needs of a life especially now. But I have to keep remembering that life is more than the practical. It is also a process of growth and becoming. And in many cases, aspects of the practical are even traded off to be able to make any significant movement forward or deepward.

My life now is a life caught in a crossroads in constant dealing with devils and angels, sometimes one masquerading as the other, sometimes both in collaboration. Because the price of a soul remains the same even if it is torn to pieces. To trade is inevitable. I was born with very limited privileges and I had used most of them up during the years when I didn't know any better and didn't even know myself. Now I battle or barter with Things grown in the impossible garden, Things seeded with spells so that even when lost they will find the way back to me.

Rather than selling one's soul I choose to lend it instead, and demand payment with interest for every day overdue. Later on, the thing to do is to get everything, every piece, back in the end.  I hope that by the time I could afford to do that, I will still have enough of the rest of myself to enjoy being whole again.