I don’t know what to write about today. I really don’t. Not a clue.
The sun is shining. Looks like it’s going to be a nice day. Maybe I’ll try and spend some time out in the garden. Can I get back into that again? At the moment, gardening is one of those things I can’t motivate myself to do. Once I get into it, I know I’ll be fine, like writing. But at present I just can’t seem to get started – on either of them. And gardens, like children and pets, don’t respond well to neglect. I have this tendency to disappear into a world of my own and other things just get left, but that doesn’t work with living things, it tends to cause problems. Actually, it causes problems with everything, housework, work, life. Maybe this is what mindfulness is about, keeping on top of things, being aware of what you’re doing and what’s happening, staying in touch with the world and not going through it in a bubble. Which is what I do most of the time. ‘Lost in a world of her own’ could be written on my tombstone, not that I’m planning to have one, a tree will do for me, that’s what I’d like, a bio-degradable coffin in a woodland burial. But not for a long, long time.
Realistically, though, what I have left is limited. So what should I be doing with it to make sure it’s better than what went before? To get to the end and think – is that it? No, I don’t want to do that.
What I will leave behind, to show that I’ve been here in the world, will be my kids and my words. What else is there that matters? My words accumulate and grow. They are here, they are in notebooks, they are on my hard drive – where else? Nowhere, really. It would be nice to think that some of them might have wormed their way into some people’s heads and hearts, who knows?
Perhaps my words have made a difference to somebody, out there in the bigger world, have affected their life in some way. I don’t have any great ambitions or delusions. But someone might have read something which made them smile or made them think, which triggered something else in themselves or their lives. Why not? It has happened to me, from stuff I’ve read here. Just enough to tip them onto a different path, I don’t mean anything dramatic, but each of these encounters changes the world in an infinitesimal way, and who can say where those changes might lead?