No News is Good News…Unless You Love to Blog!

Except for when we’re traveling (and even then I take notes), I think this might be the longest stretch I’ve ever gone without writing. Except for the occasional grocery list, I just haven’t been able to write. Now that the traveling is done for awhile, I can’t write about the places we’ve seen lately, because, well, we just haven’t been anywhere new. But what surprises me the most – and it’s one of those crazy paradox-kind of surprises – is that for perhaps the first time in over 40 years, I have NO ANGST to write about!

I mean, my entire life has been lived in a constant state of angst…I have stressed, worried, stewed and steeped in angst for as long as I can remember. Oh the fears that used to keep me mired in angst…peculiar, baffling, not-ever-likely-to-happen kinds of fears. And the worrying, the regrets, the endless litany of “should-haves, could-haves and would-haves-if-only-I-knew-then-what-I-know-now”. It was a never-ending quicksand that often kept me physically sick, emotionally paralyzed, socially inept and chronically fatigued. Dysthemia (chronic low-grade depression) was my constant companion.

Which was a miserable way to live. But which, paradoxically, gave me constant fodder for writing…my filing cabinet in the basement is crammed full of notebooks that are filled with poetry, some of it silly and immature, some of it so haunting that it can still bring me to tears just re-reading it, because I remember the agony that fueled those words and writings.

Now, well, I’m no longer living in angst. Oh, there are moments when it tries to come creeping back in, but these days, I simply don’t allow it in very far. I acknowledge the shadows hovering at the door, even allow for a brief moment of analyzing what triggered those fears and tears, and then resolutely re-focus my mind on gratitude and positive thinking…I must be getting good at it, because my truth now is that I live more in serenity than in stress, more in gratitude than in complaining and more in awareness of “abundance” than in the angst of “never enough”.

It’s a good place to be. My mind is a relatively peaceful place to live these days. Things that used to reduce me to quivering incapacitation no longer have such power to cripple me. Now I’m able to fling truth, grace and gratitude into those fears, and they simple don’t take over my mind like they used to. I’m happy about that. I’m happy that my attic is a bright and sunny refuge now instead of the dark prison that it used to be.

Yet, while it makes for a far better living space for me, it also has left me speechless, which is rare and unfamiliar territory for me. My heart has always needed and yearned to write. And it still does. I simply don’t know what to write about anymore, because I’m still savoring this stable ground of my here-and-now and don’t really know quite how to write about, well, nothing, the good kind of nothing. Much of my writing was rooted in my having to fumble my way through the minefields of fears and constant sadness. Now that I’m roaming free and  happily through lush green meadows, my writing muse doesn’t know what words to conjure up anymore.

So I’m just going with the flow. Enjoying the meander through the meadows of my peaceful now. Fending off the fear that “this too shall pass” because for once in my life, I don’t WANT this [my new-found inner peace] to pass. But I’ve had glimpses of these kinds of plateaus before, and my experience is that they usually lead somewhere new, and that those “new somewhere’s” often require more fumbling through more rubble. Since I’m not ready and willing to step off this plateau quite yet, I’m resolutely rejecting those fears and am focusing on the good and beautiful of this respite, and soaking up every sunbeam and moment of grace while they’re so abundantly free for the taking.

I’m not sure how this will translate into more writing here. Maybe I’ll have to take another trip…but not back into that dark world of angst though. No, somewhere where this new-and-improved mind of mine can celebrate her mended wings and celebrate finally having found safe sky to soar through…or maybe, for once, I’ll just stay put and enjoy the scenery right here. Something tells me that right here and right now is exactly where my wings want to be.

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Copyright © Sharon C. Matthies, Meanderings (blog), 2013. All rights reserved.

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