pleading with a nightmare is like politely asking the bubonic plague to leave
through the front door;
it's simply not within its nature,
it permeates and deepens and makes mincemeat out of marrow,
until the nightmare becomes a reality
that stays with you wherever you go,
a little memento
to remember,
like a piece of chewing gum stuck to the side of your head
to cover up a bullet hole leaking all over the desk
Pretty much, but I feel that’s mostly because not much has changed in my life in the past year. I still have the same job I had last year. And I still pretty much do the same sorts of things, like read, write, and play chess all day.
I suppose I’ve gotten to that point in my life where I don’t really aspire to radically change my life all that much within a year’s time. In fact, I kinda enjoy the consistency of how I live nowadays. There’s a simplistic freedom in knowing what to expect from day to day, month to month, and yes, even year to year.
Granted, that’s not to say that I don’t have aspirations for each year. Because I certainly do. And with regards to those aspirations that I had hoped to accomplish, well, I suppose I’ve fallen short on a good chunk of them.
At the beginning of the year, I had set out to try and re-learn playing the guitar, become more proficient in spanish and start learning portuguese, and to write more consistently each and every day. I want to say that I’ve become fairly proficient in my spanish studies, but nowhere near as fluent as I had hoped to be.
I bought a $50 guitar last year in the hopes that would motivate me to learn how to play, but I can confidently say that it has remained in the corner of my office space without being touched once. Except maybe to vacuum around and under it.
With regards to writing more, well, I guess it depends on what day of the year you look at. Some days I was incredibly productive and kept on task, while other days the little ADHD bug kept me thoroughly distracted all day and so I barely wrote my name to various work documents much less an entire paragraph of some story I was working on.
I suppose being in my thirties has made me sort of shy away from making major aspirations within a year’s time. I feel like it’s best to do incremental things within a year, but major projects and goals tend to take much longer, maybe a decade or so. In a way, that makes not fully accomplishing what I set out to do in a year not seem so bad, while also giving me a little bit of wriggle room to flesh out what it is I’m trying to do.
I really hate the idea of constantly having to reinvent myself, or do something dramatically different. I kinda felt like that when I was younger and in my late teens and early twenties, and the feeling was exhausting. Sometimes stasis is the best place to be, since even a tortoise can finish a race.
Fred Aiken Writing 