m,

New experiment: seeing the world in shades of gray. I’ve been working on it for a little while. It works better if you don’t try so hard. Like anything else. The point is to classify *stuff* (ideas, events, actions, truth? people? etc.) in your mind as what they are, which let’sbehonest is usually somewhere in the middle. Neither black nor white. The trouble with black and white is that it involves judgment, and a lot of times in a judgy mind like my own, that judgment falls back on oneself. Which can keep one in check but can also demoralize. Or paralyze. I’m speaking in very abstract terms, but I hope you can see sort of what I am saying.

In conjunction, another idea has dawned. The fact that I (we all) have lots of baskets. For proverbial eggs. Maybe it was the new blogging job (eee! still tap-dancing) that made me see it, but it takes a lot of pressure off to know that if, in fact, one area of life happens at any given moment to be shit, that it’s not all of life. There’s other good stuff. I see the good stuff a lot of times, but don’t really *see* it. Not enough to stop the shit part of life from dragging me down. All the other baskets are buoys. They don’t cancel out the black and keep you from addressing it, but they lift you up out of the muck. One day maybe I’ve done a shit job as Manager, but hey, I wrote something really great. Or was a good wife or friend. Or a smart shopper. Or all of those. There are always other things. The contents of one or a few baskets could be black and others white (and they are always changing), but together the collection is shades of gray.

yours as ever,

pen