Sunday. Rainy and Imma say “cold.”
Breakfast was eggs scrambled with veggies and cheese, and a side of toast. Hit the keyboard a little late, but still came away with 1,000 words, bringing the WIP to +/-2,045 total words.
Lunch was soup (ref rainy and “cold”) with cheese and crackers. I need to do my duty to the cats and take a walk in the basement, then I’m either working on my lesson conceits for the course I’m teaching in the fall (assuming anybody signs up), or coloring while I listen to Fledgling. I fear I’ll fall on the coloring-and-listening side of the coin. My father always said I was lazy.
Speaking of lazy. I read an article this morning about late bloomers, and how we celebrate the Brilliant Youth, but fail to celebrate the Elder who has worked an entire lifetime in order to hone themselves to a sharp edge in their chosen field. “Young people,” according to the well-known sage Mark Zuckerberg, “are just smarter.”
Why has no one ever slapped that boy?
Ahem.
Anyhow, I come before you as both a late bloomer, even a very late bloomer, and one of those tiresome personalities who cannot be bribed to do something that doesn’t interest them — a creature who becomes Deeply Entrenched in a subject (yes, I was the kid who would’ve told you all about the rocks, if I’d talked, which mostly, I didn’t), and learns everything there is to know, but ignores the five bucks offered to go do that Stoopid Thing Over There.
Apparently, late bloomers are also often “Let’s see what happens,” personalities, and this is where it gets interesting, at least to me.
When I met Steve, I was still very much struggling to understand most of the things around me. I had the rules for being a secretary and I was a good secretary. The rest of my rule sets weren’t delivering what I wanted, but I didn’t know how to find better ones.
Just throwing the rules out never occurred to me.
Steve was an instance of Chaos, a “Let’s see what happens” with whipped cream and a cherry on top. He knew how things worked, was a keen observer of almost everything, and? He could explain things, and didn’t think I was dumb for not knowing any particular something. You, perhaps, have no idea how attractive, “Let’s see what happens” is to somebody who had been taught to operate according to the rules. That all there is, are rules.
I knew I wanted to be a writer — I’d always known I wanted to be a writer — and I did know some of those rules, but the other rule sets like, oh, “talking to imaginary people is weird,” got in the way.
So, anyway, Steve taught me a lot, and, eventually, I grew into myself. His “Let’s see what happens,” steered him into side quests, but he always came back to writing, while I never found anything so fascinating as telling stories about the imaginary people I talked to. For years, we ran as partners, complementing each other, swapping what-ifs and let’s sees on the fly.
It happened slowly, but it did happen. One day I heard Steve say, “But I don’t know how that works,” and I heard myself answer, “Neither do I. Let’s try it and see what happens.”
I realized then that we had swapped places.
Which was a Moment.
Life, come to discover is all about Moments, spinning out, until they stop.
