Evening Ramblings.

Hello Folks,

It is a bit late in the evening here at my place. We just got the kids to settle down for bed. I spent my day running in circles trying to get stuff ready for school tomorrow and a bit of cleaning done. (I'm half way to a clean kitchen. This is progress.) I wish I had something profound and uplifting for you. I truly do. Unfortunately, I don't have anything clever, witty, or something amazingly spiritual.

I am sitting here listening to the playlist of music I put together based off of the songs that come up the most when the gods are playing with the radio. I am drinking hot tea, hoping my sore throat will go away, and wondering if I have caught my son's cold or if the problem is my allergies. In the light of all of this mundane stuff, I feel a bit guilty that I don't have something more luminous to share. It is frustrating because I feel like I am letting you all down right now.

I recognize, however, the person who is putting the pressure on me to perform is myself. I am at a unique place where the gods involved in my life are encouraging me to focus upon my health and welfare. They want to see me at a place where I can look at stuff like my writing and not feel inferior simply because I am not making a large novel's worth of output on a given day. The biggest thing that I keep getting pushed to keep in mind is that I am not a machine.

It doesn't sound like a very mystical or spiritual statement, does it? Still, this is the message that comes to me time and time again over the last several weeks. I am human. I have limitations and I am going to have variable days that produce a range of how I perform given my limitations. It is hard for me to accept that I am not perfect. It is a nonsensical thing for me to chase this concept of perfection. Because perfect doesn't really exist except as an idea to torture us.

Still, I struggle and often find myself ready to give up on myself because I can't perform as well as I feel like I should be. It is a problem that has been present for pretty much all of my life. I'm still working with my therapist on resolving that problem. The gods have decided that I am going to change. And I am not complaining with them. Their decision that change needs to happen is actually in line with what I have been attempting to do for the last several decades. I think that they have seen my struggle and decided to take an active hand in helping me through it.

Help from the gods, however, doesn't manifest in things magically getting easier. Often, I find myself in a position where I am challenged and things get harder before I have a breakthrough. Some people talk about ordeals and rites of passage. I tend to think of the repeated challenges that pop up and act as gateways into future growth in those terms. Some times, I wind up creating those situations myself. And sometimes the gods create them.

Either way, I am still working hard to make a positive change in my life and to grow more fully into the person that I was supposed to be. My perfectionism is not helping me on this path. It is something that I stumble over on a regular basis. I know that it is, in a big way, rooted in anxiety. Thus, I work on my mental health and try to get that mess under control. Because the more I can manage my mental illnesses and bring health into my life, the more I can mature and grow in all areas, not just my spirituality.

I don't know if I am going to be making posts every day this week. I will try. I will also try to go back to that daily theme I had going on before when I was posting every day. I recognize, and ask for your patience in this, that I am not functioning in a hypomanic state, like I was last August. This means that things take a bit more time. But it also means that things are more completely thought out before they are posted. It is my hope that what struggle there may be in producing quantity for this blog, there will be less struggle in producing quality work for it.