Distillation

Once again it has been a number of weeks since my last post and I wonder where the time goes.  It’s almost bewildering.  One of the things I expected when I retired was that I would have all kinds of time to pursue all of my whims, hours well wasted in the garage tinkering with tools, afternoons spent on the streets of Hamilton listening to, and writing the stories I encountered, renovation projects put off far too long that I would be able to finally get to, hours spent wandering the back roads on my motorcycle “livin the dream”.  And on and on.  That has not been the case and I’ve found myself often frustrated.  Not that I haven’t been able to do some of those things but that it seems the list of things I have not done is longer than the list of things I have.

When I take a few minutes to reflect on why it is that I feel more rushed and disorganized now than I did when I was working, a couple of things come to mind.  When I was working I had my job to give me a feeling of validation.  I could justify my existence every day because, well, I was at work.  When that structure was gone it was as if my life had gone off the rails and, without the job to give me a sense of purpose and direction, and the desire to have purpose every bit as strong, I found myself going off in all kinds of directions.  It’s an interesting state to be in and one that requires me to give myself a lot of grace.  Something I’m not particularly good at.

One of the things I thought I would be doing much more of is writing.  I left my job with a head full of things that I wanted to write about and it was as if it all evaporated when I finally had the chance to sit down.  When I look back on the past few months the best way to describe what I have been experiencing is a process of distillation.  I try things and realize that they are not quite what I imagined.  Or maybe fun for a while and the novelty wears off.  And, as is the case in the distillation process, I find that sometimes when the water is boiled off, I’m left with a kernel of something that I can set aside as an area of study or interest I can pursue.  It’s not unlike a crucible where impurities are burned off in order to get to the pure metal.  It’s hard.  Mostly because there are so many distractions along the way and so much uncharted territory to explore that rather than looking for things to do, I find myself overwhelmed by all the things there are to do.  The reason for the gap in blogs is because I never seem to complete a thought so the writing tends to be incoherent at times.

I am trying to get better at is writing in the midst of the mess, so here I go again.  Over the next few weeks I will try and share some of the kernels that have come out of the distillation process.