Into the Trees / 2

Yesterday I let myself fall off the world.

It was, as it transpires, remarkably simple. Instead of the stuff that needs doing I wrote down reactions in response to somebody else's poetry. I ate a new flavour of cheesecake. A L14 Human Paladin was created for a D&D Campaign I will be joining tomorrow. That Paladin's in the midst of the same existential crisis this is, if truth be told. All the work will get done, because it does.

What doesn't happen as much as would be healthy is the acceptance of self.

A remarkable amount of Stuff has taken place in the last six months. All I've done in most places is be positive, because the world doesn't need any more negativity than currently exists. The fact remains, on Friday night in a room full of strangers talking about loneliness, I realised that feeling was creeping back into me. All the connection and success in the world is nothing without your own identity inside it.

It is time to rearrange the mental furniture again.

On Friday night I was invited to do something that, on reflection, I was badly qualified for. What the evening ended up being was significant in other ways. It has finally emerged why certain situations for me begin euphorically and then become toxic. Something that wasn't a poisoned chalice may be about to become exactly that. I need to get some work done and then need to leave.

It also doesn't help that something I will be paid for this month is really not nearly as wholesome an opportunity as it first appears, and that's beginning to eat away at my sanity. Absolutely the work can and will be done, because that's always the easy part. The problems inevitably appear when you're caught between your ethical heart and a financial head that knows current existence can't have both.

The plan is to get to July with rationality as intact as possible.

There are a lot of ideas and people I have overlapped since the start of the year, and the more this happens, the more obvious it becomes that optimism and enthusiasm can only manage so much. There are some relationships that have been made that will not last until the year is out. A number I hope may last the rest of my life, but that decision is not and never has been in my hands.

What is apparent however is the importance of connection, of being able to see and feel and embrace difference in whatever form you happen to encounter. That should be a bigger part of my plan going forward. I've learnt so much in the last year about myself from other people. What hasn't been done as balance is the assessment of how that should now be guiding and directing my own progress.

It is time to reassess what a mind and soul are capable of achieving together.