A next time sometime past time

The old man sits, head bent, eyes closed, in his familiar comfortable chair, pen poised above paper bound, blank and waiting.

Suddenly his eyes drift open and his hand begins to scrawl across the page: “I remember this – this is how it was – this is why it is the way it is now – this is what I recall and when and where.”

He scrawls, alive, bringing the past and the memories and the what-is-it to life. And scrawls and scrawls.

And just as suddenly, the words have been written and the images and the thoughts are spent. Hand poised over paper, just in case, his eyes flutter and his head sags forward, and he snoozes, waiting for the next burst of energy and thought and yesterday and tomorrow and dreams of a next time sometime past time.

Here comes a living soul, and another, and another, flying past his house on missions from here to there, thousands a day on millions of missions – and somehow it all comes together.

… This is why I rise before I’m ready: to write on these pages. The words may be nonsense, but it comforts me to extract them from bleary blurs and to ramble across the page – and maybe the nonsense means something after all. If I’d slept another hour, the pages would still be blank, wouldn’t they? And then they would be saying something else entirely.

(From A Bridge at Crossroads)

People want peace

There it was, in the middle of a writing exercise where the mentor said “number a page from 1 to 25 and write 25 sentences as fast as you can, beginning with the words “I wish …”

In the middle of things like “I wish I exercised more” and “I wish I would finish my novels” and such, there it was:

I wish people didn’t hate so much.

It seems we are so quick to anger, so quick to take offense, so quick to find fault and even evil in other people, so quick to hate.

So here is my plea for peace, here in the quiet of Monday morning when the only sounds are the clocks ticking, the drip of the coffee maker, the refrigerator’s humming, a cat’s hungry grumble, and oh, I guess I’m breathing softly.

Here, Monday morning, before any of us have a chance to lose our tempers, I’m just asking you to remember:

People want peace.

Don’t they?

The WouldaShouldaCoulda pays a visit

Regrets? I’ve had a few, but then again …

They’re right about how the things you didn’t try loom larger in your memory than the things you did — I would have treated some people better, and I would have spent more time thinking through certain things.

The WouldaShouldaCoulda circled three times and settled into a ball like a fat coyote (or would have if there were ever such a thing as a fat coyote). It looked me in the eyes with a disinterested expression, which is odd because I’d always heard the WouldaShouldaCoulda was a wily predator and very interested in stealing your sleep and feeding on your dreams.

But it just sat there contentedly, watching me, watching me think about days and years that were long out of my control, until the risks and opportunities of this day — today — faded into the background.

That was when I realized what it had done, the insidious creature. It yawned, and its eyes seemed to grow heavy.

“You haven’t won,” I cried. “This isn’t over.”

But I kept thinking about what I would have done, what I should have said, and how I could have changed the course of the things that happened.

I vowed to be more bold and decisive from that moment on, and the WouldaShouldaCould opened its eyes and I could swear it looked amused. I had, after all, spent the first 20 minutes of a fresh new day dwelling on the imperfections of a past long gone and filed away, maybe not best forgotten but certainly best set aside as unchangeable.

I sighed, and to give myself the smallest of victories, I took a step forward.