Limbo

I’ve had a busy/tricky couple weeks which has included a couple plumbers, a trip to hospital and having to put one of our cats down. On the plus side, it’s also included The Beatles’ ‘Get Back’ – a week before it came out we went to a special premiere where we got to introduce our son to Paul McCartney… So, it hasn’t been all bad.

It has, however, made me grind to a halt a bit.

I started reading Dan Fox’s ‘Limbo’ – it started its life as a books of travel essays, except:

“Writing began, and it soon became clear that I was unable to add new territory to the literature of travel other than gravel for landfill. Then came a lurch of personal crises. Significant derailments, but too commonplace to warrant slinging ink at. The urgency of recounting my travels shrank to a tiny amplitude.

Writing limped. Writing crawled. Writing stopped. Words became gummed-up and gear-seized.”

This mirror of my own experience made me smile. It’s OK. I don’t need to worry that I can’t think for a bit, that life takes over and distracts me from myself.

“I felt I was in No-Man’s Land, the Twilight Zone, the Upside Down, the wasteland, the badlands and the boonies. On the side-lines, on the bench, on hold, on standby, out-of-sync, in the wings, up the creek, in a ditch, in a fix, in a funk, in stasis, in suspended animation. Muddled and moribund, mudbound in muddy waters. Clogged, congested, confounded, choked-off, jammed, stumped, stonewalled and stymied. Flummoxed, bamboozled and blocked. Frog in the throat. Bone in the gullet. Crashed into a wall. Also: dithering, floating, unanchored, unmoored, untethered, blown on the breeze. Caught between a rocky trope and a hard cliche. Stuck in limbo.”

Rather than worry about being stuck adrift, I decided to keep myself busy with something else that isn’t my MA. A friend asked if I could do a kintsugi repair of something very precious that was broken. (I did some Kintsugi lessons a few years ago for a piece I wanted to do and have done various repairs for myself over the years)… I am waiting for it to arrive and will get going on it right away.

It will be nice to just ‘do’ without ‘thinking’ for a bit.

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