The end of nothing

Due to lack of creativity and just plain being lazy, today's illustration is a photograph of my current workstation looking to the north (as if that were important). Remember, this is just another one of my temporary residences, so I cannot get too comfortable -- a few computers, a few books, a few guns. So, what is missing? Tell me.

The book of our lives

 It occurred to me that most people are recorders of their lives. Some are active recorders, writing diaries or journals or, maybe, simply keeping track of personal events on a calendar. Others do not write, but simply relive their lives through memories and by keeping a firm hold on people, places or things from their pasts.

But, a few people, and I like to think I am among them, are more than recorders of their lives. They are writers of their lives. Each day, they are thinking about and planning their tomorrows. They are writing their futures. The unexpected entry of a special someone or a natural disaster or a bit of bad luck in the form of a potentially fatal illness might alter the plot those writers are creating but, barring the unforeseen, they are formulating a plan for a segment (or, maybe, more) of their lives and then proceeding to live it.

While I have been a writer of my life most of my life, I have been neither a recorder nor a writer the past few years. In essence, I have been a branch adrift on a river, a leaf blowing on a breeze, a pen without paper. Complications enter our lives to alter our hopes and plans and goals, but, I think, it is important to find a way through the  morass of complications we encounter -- most of which are our own creations through bad decisions.

I have written here before that events during recent months have evolved, and that now I actually can see a light for me at the end of the proverbial tunnel. I guess these words are a reiteration of that thought. Barring the unforeseen, the end of my current tunnel -- which is to say my current life and existence -- is only as far away as next spring. And, I am beginning to write three or four possible scenarios as to the direction the book of my life will follow after that point in (flowing, moving, drifting) time.

Some possibilities: Back to Europe for a fourth and, maybe, a final time. (Europe fascinates me, the same way America fascinates some Europeans, and I might decide to stay there.) A boat, a big boat, to cruise upon the river Alph "down to a sunless sea," until an island is found. (In the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson).  A cabin, by a clear, blue lake deep in the mountains to forget time exists. (After the model of some Nineteenth Century American mountain men I could name.)

 A few other thoughts wander through my mind, but these seem to be leading the pack.

These thoughts aside, the main point is that I want to become a writer of my life again -- not merely a recorder and, most certainly, not a man who waits for .... for what? The end of nothing?

Missing, but not forgotten

This probably is the first year since I began my blog in which I did not mention the Marine Corps birthday (November 10) or Veterans Day (November 11).  It is not because they were not on my mind; it was because my mind was not on them.

 Do you understand the distinction?

 I mean that this year -- for some reason beyond my understanding -- these two side-by-side days did not seem as important to me as they usually do, so I more-or-less just watched as they passed me by. One does not forget those "incarnations" of his life which are imperative to his very being, but one does not always choose to speak about them in public and, sometimes, decides to hide from remembering them just a bit.