Please excuse my absence, dear readers, from the blogosphere for the past 2 weeks.
If you tuned in last week or the week before, you might have been disappointed (or relieved, I suppose) to discover no lengthy treatise on the universe in its entirety, no rambling excuse for personal narrative, no amateur philosophical musings. I don't know how much you all count on my weekly posts, but I know the disruption to my personal schedule gave me some things to seriously chew on.
It doesn't entirely make sense to me how heavily I depend on my Wednesday evening blog time, and I have struggled to explain the role it plays in my life and why I take it so seriously. It's mindboggling, how guilty and unsettled I feel when I break this commitment I've made to myself to sit down and write a blog at a particular time. I feel some obligation to you all, my readers, as well, even though my weekly pageviews could be random accidental clicks on a search result or a Facebook news feed, for all I know.
Over the past few weeks, there have been plenty of disruptions to my daily grind, both personally and on a collective level.
Our society as a whole has been reeling from a few things since I last wrote: the bombings at the Boston Marathon; the explosion in West, Texas; the ensuing investigations of both of these incidents -- just today, in fact, the arrest of 3 others in connection with the Boston bombs; the continual onslaught of horrific shootings in the news, the latest trend being small children killing each other with guns... You know as well as I do what weighs on our national conscience these days. Such tragedies and conflicts disturb us, emotionally, mentally, physically, and disrupt the relative calm of the humdrum lives so many of us are desperately pursuing.
Then there are tragedies more close to home: someone was shot right outside my friend's apartment building in West Philly last weekend. My boyfriend's grandmother spent a week in the hospital, on life support and in Hospice, until she passed away last Thursday morning. These things disturb us too, and invade our home territory, the path of our daily footfalls. We all deal with grief and fear differently, but as much as some of us (cough) try to just smooth it over and do what we've got to do, we are never really the same after "something happens."
Lately I've been struggling with my routines. I miss the days of getting random phone calls from people asking to hang out and being able to accept, right there on the spot; I miss the days of being able to pick up random phone calls in the first place! I just spent a few minutes before starting to write this post looking back over some of my earlier posts. Even a year ago I was more carefree, almost flippant; my posts were shorter and lighter; I was less dry and set in my ways.
I'm doing a lot of amazing things with my life, but there is something missing. Time to rebound. Time to process. Time to lick my wounds -- to notice them in the first place! And to heal.
So these past two weeks have made me realize that it may be time for a reboot. When so many factors outside of my control have torn my regular routine so thoroughly apart, it's made me examine why I started doing those things in the first place, what they're doing for me now, which ones I miss most when I run on a totally different track for two weeks. Which ones make me feel like they're supposed to, and which ones just aren't doing their job anymore.
Let's call it spring cleaning. I don't know yet what summer will look like when it's all said and done, what I will uncover and the total mass of discarded dust bunnies, but I hope to be able to ease into it. I pray for peace and time to grieve and the presence of mind to celebrate that which deserves celebration in this life.
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