Nostalgia for......the future?
Is it just me, or do other people also sometimes find their writing similarly following the style of the last book that held them captivated? It’s not that I don’t have a style of my own. Perhaps it’s some sort of inspiration.
I’ve always been a dramatic waxer and waner of habit and hobby. I don’t know why. Sometimes it’s a crochet needle I can’t put down. Other times it’s my laptop. Right now it’s books. It’s been too many years since that last happened. I blame its rarity on my self-and-e-diagnosed A.D.D. Believe me, it happens to “us”. I read up on it once and learned that people with the disorder often find themselves obsessed with something for a time, even reading. Something captures their attention relentlessly for a time, and then just as though it never happened, its significance vanishes (only to return again after a short or long period of dormancy).
I’m finishing books at a record rate. A book a day. A book a week. I’m still as picky as I’ve always been about what I read. This last book was phenomenal (although some of the terminology was a little unnecessarily raunchy), but I keep finding myself frustrated and unsatisfied at the ends of the books I’m choosing. I think I’m reading too many tragedies.
I wonder if I’m doing this because I view my life as too uneventful at the moment. I know that it’s not, even though I’ve neglected my journal terribly (lately I’ve resorted to occasionally penning my thoughts and categorizing my events into a notebook that I also have neglected quite a bit). My life is still producing stories at the same level of amusement and insanity that it always has. But somehow through the chaos my life still sits on hold. My impatience plagues me as I wait. I wait on everything. I wait on employment. Phone calls. God. School. My career. My future. My husband. I pray. I ask for prayer. My faith is going through a series of tests again. It’s healthy, but grow tired of it.
I found a funny parallel in the last book I read (The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger). A man who is “chrono-disabled”, who involuntarily time travels to places and events in his past (and rarely into the future, but his future self visits him regularly and gives him clues). The philosophy is that since it has already happened it cannot be changed. Even when they try to change what will happen, their attempts already are, and they inadvertently cause it to only become exactly what was already to be. There is a lot of turmoil in the character’s and his wife’s life. She knows him out of order throughout his life as his disability skips him around to different places and ages in her life. And they live in anticipation and apprehension about what they often know is inevitable (all of the tragedy and all of the joy). I love this…it’s like an amplified and surreal commentary on what my life looks like at the moment. I look too much to the future and not enough to my present…what’s to come, what’s been promised, what I expect and what I don’t.
Right now I can’t wait until tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. I pass my free time reading. Watching movies. Thinking longingly about going someplace far away. Being a director of a major motion picture that will change the view of the world. Uncovering and conveying a beautiful or tragic story in a foreign land that inspires and blesses. Being loved with reckless abandon…sung over and gazed at painfully and joyfully in a perfect moment of perpetual bliss. Putting all that is in me to use, living the adventure I am made to live.
As little unseen opportunities for exploding beauty pass me by, I sit staring out the window sighing bereft regrets of another wasted day.
I need to live again.
I’ve always been a dramatic waxer and waner of habit and hobby. I don’t know why. Sometimes it’s a crochet needle I can’t put down. Other times it’s my laptop. Right now it’s books. It’s been too many years since that last happened. I blame its rarity on my self-and-e-diagnosed A.D.D. Believe me, it happens to “us”. I read up on it once and learned that people with the disorder often find themselves obsessed with something for a time, even reading. Something captures their attention relentlessly for a time, and then just as though it never happened, its significance vanishes (only to return again after a short or long period of dormancy).
I’m finishing books at a record rate. A book a day. A book a week. I’m still as picky as I’ve always been about what I read. This last book was phenomenal (although some of the terminology was a little unnecessarily raunchy), but I keep finding myself frustrated and unsatisfied at the ends of the books I’m choosing. I think I’m reading too many tragedies.
I wonder if I’m doing this because I view my life as too uneventful at the moment. I know that it’s not, even though I’ve neglected my journal terribly (lately I’ve resorted to occasionally penning my thoughts and categorizing my events into a notebook that I also have neglected quite a bit). My life is still producing stories at the same level of amusement and insanity that it always has. But somehow through the chaos my life still sits on hold. My impatience plagues me as I wait. I wait on everything. I wait on employment. Phone calls. God. School. My career. My future. My husband. I pray. I ask for prayer. My faith is going through a series of tests again. It’s healthy, but grow tired of it.
I found a funny parallel in the last book I read (The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger). A man who is “chrono-disabled”, who involuntarily time travels to places and events in his past (and rarely into the future, but his future self visits him regularly and gives him clues). The philosophy is that since it has already happened it cannot be changed. Even when they try to change what will happen, their attempts already are, and they inadvertently cause it to only become exactly what was already to be. There is a lot of turmoil in the character’s and his wife’s life. She knows him out of order throughout his life as his disability skips him around to different places and ages in her life. And they live in anticipation and apprehension about what they often know is inevitable (all of the tragedy and all of the joy). I love this…it’s like an amplified and surreal commentary on what my life looks like at the moment. I look too much to the future and not enough to my present…what’s to come, what’s been promised, what I expect and what I don’t.
Right now I can’t wait until tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. I pass my free time reading. Watching movies. Thinking longingly about going someplace far away. Being a director of a major motion picture that will change the view of the world. Uncovering and conveying a beautiful or tragic story in a foreign land that inspires and blesses. Being loved with reckless abandon…sung over and gazed at painfully and joyfully in a perfect moment of perpetual bliss. Putting all that is in me to use, living the adventure I am made to live.
As little unseen opportunities for exploding beauty pass me by, I sit staring out the window sighing bereft regrets of another wasted day.
I need to live again.