Purpose

It's been a strange, melancholy sort of day, one of those where your mind meanders in all directions while your body goes about on its own, until late in the day you look around and notice where you are and wonder how you got there.


I feel continually on the edge of something these days, as if I were only steps away from a wider world, but I lack something that would allow me to take them... courage perhaps?  Confidence?  Determination?  Talent?


The vain part of me, the writer part (for really what is more arrogant than assuming that of all the books written in the world, people will want to read yours?) wants something bigger. Not fame exactly, but something meaningful, something lasting.  I suppose it's what everyone wants.  We want to know our lives have touched the lives of others.  It makes us feel less alone.  It lets us know where we fit.  We all strive for self-sufficiancy, but we long for other people to depend on us.  I enjoy my days alone, the opportunity for thought and silence, but it is the thought of Aaron coming home at night that gives me purpose.  I write for the love of it, for the imaginative process, for the cathartic release, but to write for people who wanted to read what I'd written would give my imagination purpose.  As it is I can't help feeling a sting of guilt whenever I spend time on the novels that I could have spent doing something more profitable.  I still do it, of course, but to write with freedom of time and singleness of mind is still a far-off dream.


I had planned to post something witty and humorous today instead of this doleful thing, but wit and humor deserted me and shall have to wait for a later date.

Dreams

Had a perfectly horrid dream last night.  It's already beginning to fade, so I'm grateful for that, but I remember running away, running in fear from someone I had liked and trusted.


I don't have frightening dreams very often.  As a child, I did sometimes dream that my blankets had turned into snakes, and that was terrifying, but generally my dreams were just amusing and adventurous, or strange, like the recurring dream I had for years that I was falling from the top of our bunk bed.  I never fell more than halfway down, and then I would suddenly bounce back to the top and fall again, like a yo-yo.  It would go on like that for what seemed like hours, and was always kind of fun and soothing.  I also had dreams fairly regularly that involved being lost in a large old house, or sometimes a castle, with a group of friends.  We were generally on a quest of some kind, and sometimes followed, but it always felt more exciting and adventurous than scary.


I will go for months at a time without remembering any of my dreams, and then I will have a string of them all at once, very vivid and strange.  For the last week or so it's been the latter.  I don't really go in for dream analysis.  I don't spend considerable time wondering what it means when I dream that a friend was sent a pink cupcake for mother's day, or a king died and left his daughters scrunchies which they were commanded to wear every day for the rest of their lives.  There are times when I wonder a little... like when I had recurring cancer dreams the year before I was diagnosed.  Then I dream about sledding to work and stopping to order Dutch Babies (the breakfast food, not infants from Holland) on the way at a phone hanging from a tree, and once again I discount meaning entirely.