Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Illumination

It’s only been around 3 months since my last post! I thought for sure it would’ve been longer. It feels longer. Hope any of you still out there are doing well and enjoying life.
It’s finally summer here in Seattle and it only took until the last two weeks of August. Lucky us! I’ll freely admit that this “summer” has made me feel like it might be time to leave this city for places unknown, but when you see the Puget sound so bright and blue on those perfectly sunny days…sigh…it’s tough to want to leave. You’ll probably be hearing this exact same go around next Spring.
So what has dragged me away from blogland? No good excuse I’m afraid. Frankly, I didn’t want to think about weight loss anymore. I still kind of don’t. I’m going through what appears to be a transitional time in my life, and weight loss just doesn’t seem all that important right at the moment. In fact, it became a distraction. Maybe even a crutch. If I could just constantly be worried about what I was eating and when I was working out, I didn’t have to think about anything else. I didn’t have to think about how frustrated I was with my job, or that I felt disconnected from my friendships, or mad at my husband. I was losing weight, gosh darn it! That’s a higher calling, don’t you know? Truth is that I was letting it distract me from dealing with everything else. Don’t get me wrong – I haven’t actually dealt with everything else. But now I’m THINKING about dealing with everything else. At the very least I’m aware that there are other things to be dealt with.
As I was perusing around to some other blogs, I see that so many others have continued to share their journey. Christine at A Deliberate Life was brutally self honest as usual and infinitely relateable. Her comments about trying to fix others to avoid taking a hard look at yourself were right on the mark for me. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time checking out everyone else’s paper to make sure their on track while ignoring my own work to be done. Why, oh why is it so hard to see ourselves clearly? It would just be so much easier to fix everyone else’s problems first. Their problems are all so clear and obvious! Easily fixed! Whereas I feel like I can’t even get a handle on what the real problem actually IS.
I guess that’s life, right? There’s just going to be a certain amount of stumbling around in the dark – literally and figuratively. I keep waiting for the beam of light to illuminate it all for me, clear as day, with a huge booming voice saying “This way! This is the way you’re meant to go!” Unfortunately, it seems like right now all I’m getting is the light from a crack under the door. I can see vague shapes and promising possibilities, but even when I’m standing right next to them, I tend to miss them. There’s something right there, and I’m trying to reach out and grab it, but it’s not going to be caught so easily this time. I have to work for it. Which would be fine if I knew what work needed to be done.
Just a bit of existential blathering. Needless to say, I’m feeling a bit lost these days. It just feels like it’s taking forever to find…whatever it is I’m looking for.