At some point maybe ten years ago I realized that a fundamental pillar of myself had collapsed. I watched it fall and I did nothing. It wasn’t just in the details, it was the details. I stopped focusing on the little things in order to try to see some bigger picture view. As a result those little things added up the way one weed eventually becomes a weed-filled yard and that yard leads to a broken visage and that visage, once beautiful, becomes a dump. In that way I’ve watched my self and soul degrade into a dump. I’ve watched myself become a person who routinely allows assholes to not only walk over me but to get in my head. I’ve become a person who, instead of doing what I want to be doing with my life, is doing an unstable and watered down version of it because I am no longer operating from a stable foundation.
I think about how to repair the foundation all the time. All the while I continue to get older. I continue to grow into recognize death as an increasingly close eventuality. I continue to see my existence as a setting sun vs. dawning or midday or anything that promises long lived days or a positive future. I talk about being surrounded by negativity, but you don’t have to dig very deep into my past to recognize that the last time I wasn’t constantly surrounded by negativity I was 11 years old. I suffered from arrested development about a year later.
I long looked at lists as a way of organizing what was happening in my life and scratching off what needed to get done on a day to day basis. That stop-gap approach got me nowhere. The problem wasn’t the lists but what was on them and how much time I devoted to me and being a better version of me. Not much, to be honest. So, moving forward I am going to put aside a period of time–I don’t know how much–to rebuild myself and to worry about nobody and nothing else but that task.
I’ll start today.