I wake in the morning and roll onto my back, gently rubbing my eyes and grasping at the tails of hazy dreams racing away from recollection. I try to come to terms with what today means based on what yesterday had been. What is there to do and how urgent is it? Are my obligations many, or have I earned a day of rest? I’ve never been good at managing time and for as long as I can remember I’ve been aware that it’s limited.
I come across small pieces of paper ripped haphazardly and placed deep into the bindings of my own books. Scanning the marked page, I can’t find the sentiment that once sparkled, yet find a notable sentence a few pages later that somehow escaped detection. Flipping through papers I wrote a short time ago, I’m unable to follow the logic of my own arguments. For all intents and purposes these pages were constructed by the mind of someone else; someone with a singular, defined focus, living and breathing the context they were written in.
My preferences are dubious at best. Though I left Alberta nearly a decade ago, images of Banff and the foothills of the Rocky Mountains make me long to return as if they no longer exist: a lost Atlantis wiped from the prairies. The notion of moving to Europe or Central America to embrace a rich and joyful culture provides a rush of excitement. Yet the thought of living out my days in a modern, wide windowed house somewhere along the open stretch of subtle land in the East Kootenays seems to me to me good as anything else.
I’m suspicious of my own ambition— of how much I possess, and what purpose it serves. Would great success as a writer put me at ease, or make me more restless? Would it liberate me with doors swung open and offers at my feet? Or would I feel shackled by responsibility and a pre-existing standard? I’d like to say that it’s a matter of perspective, but I’m certainly not sure enough to put the weight of my life on it. I’m often reminded of what A.R. Ammons wrote at the age of 63: “who has done, or am I likely to do / anything the world won’t twirl without” but temper his sentiment with the knowledge that the line is part of an award winning poem he still found reason to write.
I feel myself changing by the day, as if my regenerating cells aren’t passing on adequate memory and information, rendering me unrecognizable to myself, over and over again. Perhaps it’s relative youth that’s responsible. Perhaps I will settle as I get older, and my mind will slow down. This hardly consoles me, and I still feel myself searching for something internally consistent. So I wake in the morning with intention of a different kind. I aspire to elegance and kindness: to handle ambitions, relationships, and the shortcomings of myself and others gracefully. To create a circle of warmth from the love in my life that isn’t diluted by obligation or geographic location. My motivations are precarious, yes. But no more precarious than working towards vague notions of contentment, happiness or success. I feel the support of this effort straighten my spine and guide me through the choices I make and the words that I speak (or more often, choose not to.) I Strive to be the woman I would want my own daughter to be: positive, luminous and adventurous, whether she’s 15 or 30, a writer, a wife or a waitress, all of the above or something else entirely.
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