Ending One Life To Search For Another

Summary: We finished the first season with a feeling of complete disillusionment. There were so many things going on that didn't feel as though the earth was spinning in the direction it needs to spin. We took the time to stop, to think, to explore, and to study. That adventure ended up taking us to some places we hadn't anticipated. To explain how this great mental exercise took place, you need to understand a bit about my early morning routine. My day is divided into four parts: thinking, doing, napping, and winding down. Mostly. Sometimes. Not every day quite fits neatly into that schedule but that's another topic. What set off this exploration was my morning schedule. My alarm goes off at 4:00 AM every morning, not because I have someplace to be that early, but because I enjoy the quiet that pre-dawn provides. Even the birds are still asleep when I get up and I like that level of quiet. I let the dogs out, start coffee, and then go about handling a handful of chores—making sure the animals are fed, dealing with laundry and a cantankerous washing machine, cleaning up the messes the cats made during the night. I put my teeth in my mouth and then sit down and look at my phone for the first time. There are always plenty of notifications, mostly social media that I brush off unless something is directed specifically toward me. I pay attention to critical matters, crimes that happened within a mile of where I live, things that might affect me or my family, and then put the phone down. By now the coffee's done. I fill my cup and move into the living room where my desk is crowded with books and fabric and medicine and mail and notes to and from teachers. Everything that doesn't have a specific home, and a few things that do, end up on my desk. Funny how that happens. Most mornings, I reach for a notebook, take the lid off my fountain pen, and start writing. This is the most pleasant part of my day. I love the feeling of the nib on the heavy paper. Watching the ink as it swirls and forms words on the page thrills me. I pay careful attention not only to what I'm writing but how I'm writing it. Are all my words angled at the same degree? Are there any odd gaps or words shoved too close together? If I am going to feel any level of personal satisfaction, it's most likely to be right here, at this moment. So when that moment stopped generating that feeling of satisfaction a few weeks ago, I had to stop and consider why. What changed? Was I doing something different? Was I being affected by something that hadn't bothered me before? I needed to find answers and in finding those answers I discovered some things about myself that made me uncomfortable. By the end, I realized something difficult to admit: I'm going to have to change. The World Isn't What It Used To Be There was a time, not all that long ago, when I thought I knew what the world was. I thought I knew what was right and what was wrong, what was truth and what was a lie, what was good and what was bad. What I've come to realize across the past few weeks is that none of that holds true anymore. Nothing that was, is still. Let me explain. We know change is a constant. We expect that and from the earliest point in our lives, we've learned to adjust to those changes. We stopped taking a bottle in favor of a cup, moved from liquid foods to solids. We stopped wearing diapers and learned to go to the restroom on our own. We learned to dress ourselves in clothes that we like wearing. We maneuvered our way through school grades, each one significantly different than the one before it. We get change.

Ending One Life To Search For Another

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