Blocked

I don’t write here on a regular schedule, but I do try to write here regularly. And I feel like I’ve been MIA. I’ve opened the Blogger tab multiple times, but never made it to writing a post. Yesterday, it finally occurred to me that I feel, well, blocked. There are so many thoughts in my head right now – so many things to worry about, to remember, to keep straight. And, of course, as we all know, there is so much going on out in the world. I just keep thinking that 2020 has even more surprises up its sleeve… (do years have sleeves? anyway…) 

Sometimes when I have writer’s block related to work, and I’m stuck on a manuscript or some other writing, my solution is just to close my eyes and type. (Side note: thank goodness I learned to touch-type when I was 8… it has served me well lo these many years. Thanks, Dad!) I’m finding that it’s the same here. If I just come and start typing, the thoughts come – and sometimes, they’re even coherent. I’m not sure if these thoughts reach that relatively low bar, but it helps to get them out on screen, even if they’re jumbled and messy. 

At this point in the year, with so much going on with work and life and people and politics and the country and world, I feel like I’m constantly searching for calm, for equilibrium. Digging through all of my quotes for some guidance, some reassurance, I found comfort in this: 

“…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
~Rilke