blog (November, 2003)
fits and starts
I don't have the patience this moment to flip back too many pages in the notebook, but my lifetimeline the past couple years looks like plateau after plateau. I don't know if each one is a bit higher than the next -- let's not carry out a metaphor just for the sake of the metaphor -- just that during each between_gap things sort of spread themselves out, and I'm not quite sure how they'll re-form.
Much of the between_gap time an anxiousness gnaws at me. I'll have this notion of how I think I'd like the next plateau to look, and I find myself very selfconscious of repeating this over and over to people in conversation. The last gap, my elevator pitch was basically:
"I'd like west coast, but just someplace new; not Rochester or Cleveland -- I wanna stick around in the states for awhile, earn a bit of money; a good, interesting software development job: want to bury myself in programming..." And so on.
I guess these notions don't only happen in the gap time. Right now, running along my current plateau, (which didn't turn out so much like I'd planned,) I've devised a new scheme of my direction, and I find myself, again, repeating this in conversation. I don't know whether I'm trying to convince myself or just talking about what's bouncing around in my head, but I'm certainly conscious of a kind of hesitation.
So, to come out with it, I don't know how long this plateau will last, but at the moment I'm trying to forge a kind of lifeness here. In my job, activities, home, and social circles I'm struggling to establish a sphere of -- not influence -- just... being. I want to dig my nails into my work, into Cleveland, into a few different "scenes," and hopefully begin bouncing off more kindred-ilk/folk.
Exertion was today's topic at tonight's Shambhala meeting. Afterward on my run, I passed a gas station, and the thought to check my gauge leaked out of my driver's subconscious. At least I didn't decide to run to Ashtabula where unleaded's only $1.40 per gallon...