On paper

What a weekend.

Saturday, I went to a conference that I've attended before. It always recharged me, in the past. This time, it didn't. Many reasons (almost all of them completely external to me, for once), but "recharging" is what I hoped for, and sadness and grieving were what I received.

It was a two-day conference; I was so bummed out by the Saturday session that I bailed on the Sunday session (I foresaw a repeat of Saturday's non-recharging, I saw no reason to drive that distance, and sit in the really really hard-to-deal-with chairs, merely to get disappointed for several hours, again). Instead, I stayed home and spent the time writing some workhorse music for Pentecost (hymn arrangements for brass quartet), stuff that fit into the "for various reasons, that needs to be done first" category. I'm taking a break to type this, then I'm going to go back to saw away at another work, A Big Piece that, @$@#$ it, I promised myself quite literally years ago that I'd have done for this June's graduation, and not having it done is really pissing me off. Hardly a "muse-attracting" emotion, but there you are.

At some point, I'm going to need to connect with the gift of yesterday's disappointment. I'm so "out of energy," so "having no fun," so "finding no enjoyment in anything," I'm looking desperately for anything outside of me that I can hug and get some reassurance from.

And I'm not finding it. Anywhere.

In my head, I know that the lesson is to look within for joy, not without. Yeah, on paper, that's a great lesson.

But in my heart, I'm not connecting with that particular lesson. I just don't care enough.

The longer-every-day litany of body-used-to-function-better-but-doesn't-seem-to-want-to-anymore is most definitely NOT facilitating the finding of joy in anything.

If anything, it's reinforcing "I just don't care about anything anymore."

In my head, I think that I probably still do care. Yeah, on paper, I suppose I still care.

On paper. But my heart? My spirit? Those are seriously disconnected from really caring.

In my head, I know that this is an MS hurdle that needs to be overleaped.

Yup. Grapple with it, and overcome it. That's what needs to be done!

On paper, that's a great idea, isn't it.

Bring on the thing

Eight needles, instead of the usual four, to reconnect me with ... me. But things are better now. Much better now.

Music is rattling through my head, wanting to be written. What I despaired of so much yesterday was as I (mentally) suspected: right idea, wrong implementation. It's going to take a bit of effort to rewrite what's there, but at least the idea's there, and that's actually the hard part.

At least, that's always been the hard part; it's certainly the hard part to getting the whole thing started. Nowadays, though, the "hard part" includes having enough energy to sit behind the computer and peck at the score.

I'm not feeling exactly full of vim and vigor tonight, but maybe I'll do a little of the pedestrian pecking, that doesn't require so much flame-of-creativity energy. I know what needs to be adjusted, it'll just take a little bit of time to adjust it.

This "vague fatigue" thing is the worst part of the MS experience. I used to do an amazing amount of amazingly varied things, all of them with a fervent dedication to quality. Nowadays, I just come home, and lie down.

If I could choose only one thing to eradicate from my MS experience... it would be that soul sucking, creativity sucking, manifestation sucking, joy sucking, fatigue. I'd love to get my joie de vivre back. My enthusiasm. Any enthusiasm, for that matter.

"Thoughts become things," the Science of Mind church teaches. Well, there's my thought. A return to enthusiasm, to manifestation, to joy.

Bring on the thing.

Hope.Nope.

A challenging day, at work. Kids were fine, there were many smiles and delightful laughs.

Adults... well, there were challenges, let's just say. Frayed tempers and exhaustion (theirs) didn't help matters; "it'll grow back" as my college band director used to say in such situations. But it was one of those conditions where "fault." where it existed--and I'm not sure a lot of it does--was distributed in a rather diffuse cloud. W. Edwards Deming would have called it a "system failure." But people who don't deal in a system or system-analysis world don't relate to the idea of "it's nobody's 'fault'--in those terms." (Note to skeptics: Yeah, sometimes booboos are "somebody's fault," but when the system itself has flaws, it's hardly surprising that the system doesn't produce things error-free; it's not the gears "fault" if they produce no power when their cogs are intact and correctly machined, but they are not engaged correctly.)

The point of which is, I arrived home demoralized and exhausted, I lay down on the bed for an hour or two, even by my "I'm never hungry any more" standards I didn't feel like eating anything, pretended to eat something, then sat down to work on a musical composition.

I'm not... that... happy with it, right now. Yeah, I know, you can't command the muse to serve you, sometimes you just gotta hack at things for a while until they start to flow, but...

My herbalist said, "Here, we never give up hope."

And looking at my composition, I'm pretty much ready to give up hope. And it. That's not good; neither of those are good.

I'm going to press "pause" for tonight. Not "eject." Intellectually, I know that some things need to be written, then thrown away, and then written again (the second time, the right way), that's sometimes the natural order of things. That's not a cause to give up, certainly... at least, I know that. Intellectually.

Intellectually, I know that I'm not supposed to give up hope. I can certainly pretend to be keeping hope alive--if there's anything I'm good at, it's denial.

But, to be honest with you, I think I have given up hope. Not just on this piece. Hope for a lot of things, many of which have to do with music, both composition and performance.

Let's hope (that word's inescapable, isn't it?) that my acupuncturing tomorrow will reconnect my soul to itself and to the universe. Again, to be honest with you, even though it has done so before... I don't have much hope for that, either.

Not a good day, for hope.