Morning Pages - 3.29.16

3.29.16

Good morning. I already feel ambivalent about my decision to write in the mornings. On the one hand, great! I’m up! I’m beginning the day before the day begins! On the other hand, I question putting my morning thoughts out for other people. I resist typing, which is most of my day already, instead of writing longhand, which is how I talk to god.

Great, I just made myself tear up… and I’m only a few sentences in.

Why am I doing this? Why not just keep writing in my journal, in privately, like I’ve done since I was 13?

Honestly, I don’t know yet.

But I did check in with myself before making the declaration that I will get up at 5:45 in the mornings, to sit, to read, to write, to begin the day, as if on purpose. I have lately gotten in the habit of checking with my body, asking her ‘are you sure I am going to do this?’

Her answer: yes.

So I find myself doing this, knowing it’s my next step, but not yet having the words to articulate my reasons for it.

They are there, I can feel them. It’s something like this: for the past year, I have been cleaning up my side of the street. I have been watching and waiting, arranging and being with. I gave myself permission to do this. I was tired. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go any further. Things were pretty damn good. Why rock the boat? Why not coast for the next 20 years?

But what’s been unfolding before me is that, in the words of Audre Lorde, “your silence will not protect you.” I can see my life organizing itself in a way that keeps me privately comfortable and quite snug. But I am aware of so much suffering, sadness, and hurt in the world.

If I can see it, and I know that I have been given a lot in this life, who am I to continue to feather my own nest, while ignoring the community?

I had one vision of my life, where I have all this nice, matching, expensive stuff. Everything is well designed and beautiful. My life looks perfect. But it feels empty.

I am here to live out something else. A messy, weird, ruptured and repaired life where I engage, if imperfectly. And let people in, even if they don’t understand. And let myself be moved and shaped by other people, by this being all too human, by the perfect imperfection of it all.

And the other thing I got is that this is no longer my private journey. Sure, I continue to have a private self. But the move here is to pull even more of my private ideas and feelings into a space where other people can see and use them. Even if I feel uncomfortable and a little shy about it. Even if I change my mind. Even if I haven’t gotten it all tidy and polished yet.

Shit.

I think I thought that in middle age, I would be a lot more certain of things. But what I’m getting is that maybe it’s not about certainty, it’s about being earnest and just fucking owning the fact that you don’t know. You don’t have the answers. And even when you get some, they have a nasty and inconvenient way of changing and shapeshifting on you.

Where did I get the idea that ‘having the answers’ was something to aspire to, anyway?
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