I’m done with self-improvement. It’s not that I don’t want to lose weight, exercise more, or keep a cleaner house. And it’s not that I’m not going to continue to strive for those goals. But at my age (55), I am getting a bit introspective. When I am on my death bed, will I care about my BMI or kitchen floor? I think not.
What will I care about, though? What regrets might I have? According to the AARP Magazine, I am in the Age of Regret right now. The woulda-coulda-shoulda phase of middle age. I often wish I had been a better parent, although I must have been a good enough parent because my kids are grown and self-supporting and following their own paths quite well, thank you very much. I used to wish I had majored in math and/or English in college, but now that my career is on its downward slope, I see that it would not have mattered much in the long run. Making different choices in the past would have required that I be someone else. Also, I am acutely aware that a different choice would not necessarily have been a better choice. Outcomes are never guaranteed.
So let’s look forward instead. What might I regret on my death bed? Right now, the biggest regret I think I face is that I did not write. At age 9, it occurred to me that I did not have to become a nurse or a secretary, but I could be a writer. And I had teachers and professors who thought so too. And I did make periodic stabs at writing. But you know what? Writing is hard work. It takes discipline. And it takes a certain amount of time and concentration and dedication.
And it takes a certain amount of effort to find one’s voice, which is what I am trying to do with this blog. While I do knit, this is not a knitting blog. The “yarn” in the title is a metaphor for the threads of thought with which I wrestle on a daily basis. The idea is to stop the threads from running through my mind and to get them to run through my fingers instead, out onto a virtual blank page.
Will anything come of this effort? Who knows. Let’s divorce ourselves from preconceived expectations. Harold Pinter said “When you can’t write, you feel you’ve been banished from yourself.” When you can write but don’t, you do the banishing yourself.
