pattern play
on a grey march day
It’s the shadows that reveal the pattern: dark light white, dark light white. The days roll into a fog of sameness, and I am stuck, wallowing in boredom, or ennui, or something worse: a voice that whispers not good enough.
Habits form and are broken. Wounds heal and become scars. Time is relentless and finite and never sits still.
Chaos is the natural order of things. We fight it, stacking plates and sorting socks, pushing snow and building walls, but it’s always there, lurking around every corner.
I kind of like that.
Except when I don’t, but that’s the nature of life.
I think a lot lately of a book that changed my life once, a very long time ago. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham. It’s essentially a book about giving up, accepting, trying less and being more. At least that’s what it was for me.
The joy of sinking into who you are rather than who you want to be.
Walking into the sea of self and washing yourself clean of life’s dust.
Standing naked in today’s mirror and not cringing at your own humanity. Not wishing to be something or someone or someplace other.
I cook dinner and wash the plates. Again and again and again. I tidy the room and sweep the floors and straighten the papers on my desk.
The chaos always returns.
We spend our lives fighting for order in a world that offers anarchy.
And that’s the lesson. That’s the pattern.
Just now, the plates are clean.
.
.
.
March 5th, 2015 at 10:50 am
we do fight it, don’t we? stacking the plates and folding the towels just so are about the only power we have. i, too, mostly like it. mostly.
March 5th, 2015 at 11:27 am
i really need to check that book out…
there is a zen-ness to going with the flow…
accepting the chaos and gently guiding it to get where you need…
March 5th, 2015 at 12:58 pm
I married a champion in the endless war of control vs. chaos; it’s an untenable campaign, full of frustration. Nature has its own way; I prefer to walk with it. I wish my warrior would read your words.