weight

The blog boycott has ended, without even me realizing it had begun. My last entry was wrenching to write. For weeks I worked to assemble the perfect words to hold my heart carefully suspended in a Word document. I wrote and edited and revised and prayed. After being the unsuspecting object of misplaced political frustration, I had wanted (perhaps too desperately) to explain my point of view, to share my story.

But after all the expended emotions, time, and creative energy, I’m still not even sure that the people it was largely written for even took the time to read it. The wonderful responses from all perspectives and all continents couldn’t completely drown out the silence of a very few. The conversation was over, as was the election soon after, and there was nothing left to say.

I guess that’s the call of a writer to some degree – to very publicly bare your soul, realizing that some people just assume cover their eyes, or look the other way.

But now the weight of a muted voice is too much not to try to peck my way out, key by key, letter by letter. Under the weight of an avalanche, even an ice pick is useful. It’s the weight of dread once the comfort of the holiday season was over, and the pace of life returned to the fury and futility of the day to day. The weight of recitations of all I have to do, little of which is actually very important. The weight of stress and frustration, making breaths shallow and sleep fitful. The weight of the calls that never came, or that I never placed. The literal weight around my middle that feels like a physical manifestation of the heaviness in my heart, noticeable mostly to me.

Oh, I know. It’s not nearly so dreadful, and some days are still fabulous. (The last time I posted something solemn I got an immediate call from a most loved one asking what happened to the Real Bonnie.) I’m just purging again to my therapist/laptop, so don't worry. Sometimes I approach writing like I’m on a scavenger hunt for clarity. If I write and write long enough, I can usually glimpse a mile-maker a few paragraphs in, or see a compass-like direction emerge once I re-read my ramblings.

Lately, I’ve been weighing a question we all probably grapple with from time to time – what’s more important, to spend our days toiling away at something we don’t necessarily enjoy to have money to do things we do enjoy, or to throw caution to the wind, break with the norm, and chase after our life’s calling which may or may not lead to any kind of financial stability?

I have just been trying to figure out if, on a practical level, my present state is all self-induced? I knowingly, consciously choose to turn at the mile marker and end up here, so am I free to just choose again crank my engine and drive away? Or do I have to wait for another Divine Opportunity, or for things to reach a certain depth of intolerable before I can launch my life into a new direction, leaving "security" behind? Do I even have to justify it if I did, and to whom?

As adventurous as I am, I feel like the risk-taker in me atrophied a bit post-disaster work. In my daily life now I rarely take risks of any kind. I handle staplers and scissors sometimes, and drive amid local crazies, but that’s about it for me and danger. It’s almost like I’m out of practice taking chances and have now found myself too weighted down by routine to make any kind of big leap in life… just when I may need to the most.

I was on my way home from Geneva when I started writing this. A four-day trip that’s as easy as hopscotch, and typifies one of the heaviest shackles I have to where I am now – the freedom to travel the world on someone else’s dime. Terrible, isn’t it? And terribly addictive. A leap of faith now may just cost me my Gold Elite flyer status, and glimpses of conference rooms in exotic places.

Am I willing to take the chance that a literal world of possibilities may open up, if I just jump? Realistically, practically, I’m just not sure. But it feels good to have at least found my way to the question...

****************************************
Let me learn by paradox
That the way down is the way up,
That to be low is to be high,
That the broken heart is the healed heart,
That the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit,
That the repenting soul is the victorious soul,
That to have nothing is to possess all,
That to bear the cross is to wear the crown,
That to give is to receive,
That the valley is the place of vision.

-A Puritan prayer