This morning I trolled around in my blog archives to see what year Sunny came to live with us. Turns out it was 2005. December in fact.
I am SO unreliable about how much time has passed. It is universal in my overloaded brain. I have a warped sense of time.
But that's not what's on my mind this morning... really.
What is on my mind is how flat I feel emotionally these days.
It is so easy to place the blame on the cacophony of the election chaos. And that does play a part in my distracted state.
Also it seems that my sense of humor has gone on some sort of extended leave of absence. I am so used to relying on it to help me through the rough patches, that I find myself at a near standstill when some little blip comes along in my daily routine.
I can't call it despair, that is not at all accurate. Ennui is not it either, because there is too much going on all around me to even GET to ennui. It's not that I am behind on taking care of business, because I have gotten a LOT of things completed this summer and fall.
Maybe it is just good old fashioned Future Shock, with a side of Harried Leisure Class thrown in to spice things up.
I don't have any answers or exit strategies for dealing with my condition today, I'm just making note of it.
I was daydreaming about spending about four or five days completely alone in a remote place. Perhaps listening to the wind blowing through pine trees would help clear my mind.
Alas, I have no such idyllic retreat, so I will have to continue to muddle along, keeping my commitments to a minimum for a little while.
One of those commitments, I do not regret getting into is my art class. I will be heading over there this afternoon, hauling my assignment with me. I sat down yesterday and did a colored pencil drawing of a design I saw on the internet, and believe it or not, I worked at it in while taking phone calls and dealing with dogs pestering me. It was uncharateristic of me to be able to focus amid such distraction. I just kept tinkering with it until it looked right to me.
Doing anything creative is such a relief for the mind and soul.
In order to do your creative work, certain switches need to be flipped off. The worry switch, the hyper-responsible switch, the vigilant switch, the 'should' switch. Everybody has to shut up while you are in the zone.
I think it was Abraham Maslow who described this as a 'peak experience'. It's a state of being in the moment so much that everything else has to take a breather. It's really really good for us to go to this place from time to time.
There can be a lot of guilt piled on us from our society, if you aren't producing. Even our hobbies are supposed to be lucrative. My little drawing will never be worth money.
And it doesn't matter. It already fulfilled its purpose.
It helped keep me sane. That's worth a lot don't you think?
And now just to confuse the issue, I will make mention that I signed up and paid for my table at the annual craft fair where I will try to sell some of my knitting. I have decided this year I will be putting bargain basement prices on my things. I want to clear things out and start fresh. I'm hoping for a new direction, and these projects are preying on my mind from their little plastic storage containers.
A new year is upon me. I want a new perspective. And a good way to get that, is to clean out closets. Literally.
Now if we could just clean out the political closets....
But that's another story.
For another day.