Life’s Fulcrum

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The last couple of weeks have been . . . frozen. I try not to get too personal out here in the blog, for obvious reasons. I hope to mainly focus on writing, but sometimes thoughts about writing and editing and work simply are eclipsed by the rest of life.

Rachel has been ill, but not too much so. She was out of school most of last week and I doubt she’ll go tomorrow. That, in itself, closes me off. Difficult to think about writing when your kid is struggling for breath in the next room. Harder still to edit and do a good job.

I try not to beat myself up for the work not done, but it’s never easy. I take my work and my deadlines seriously, and it’s a deep thread of guilt when I’m not living up to them. I also try to go to bed and sleep easily, trying not to think about the neurologist’s words about Rachel, at 19, being more suseptible to what they call SUDS, or Sudden Unexplained Death Syndrome. Obviously, I’d rather think about work.

As writers, we have a creative spirit that drives us to put fingers-to-keyboard or pen-to-paper. We are storytellers, as pushed to spin the tale as those who once stood around the fires weaving songs and visions of mythic heroes. This is a part of our soul we must feed.

But few of us are monks in a cell, with only our writing in front of us. We’re parents, employees, coaches, spouses, volunteers. We are meant to live a fully balanced life. Such balance helps us become better at each responsibility. Better writers.

Yet sometimes life gets out of balance. Emails go unanswered; deadlines are missed. Blogs go empty; sick days are used.

The trick, I suppose, is to not let the unbalance become tunnel vision, to get so focused on one job or obstacle or fascination that everything else continues to go slack. That’s sort of where I am now, fighting for balance on a wobbly board, wondering if it wouldn’t, for instance, be more beneficial for me to get an hour of sun while trimming the shrubs than hanging in my office to answer one more delayed email.

I did have a friend drop by last night, and out of the blue, she asked me how I defined heroes. She’d not read my blog, and when I asked her to read the previous entries, she bluntly informed me I still hadn’t answer the question.

Ha! I need friends like this. To jumpstart some part of my life that I’d let go slack. A nudge which results in a prayer of thanks. For friends. And for all the blessings I DO have.

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