It has been a time since I have had any creativity to write. I have been bothered by life and let it get the best of me. For me, the fast pace of living drains my sense of joy and that very creativity I need to think, let alone write. I am just now coming out of one of those battles. Maybe that is what people call having a block - I surely have been blocked.
Maybe you know how I feel. Maybe you also get bogged down by work, chores, relationship difficulties, even health, or financial issues. These negatives steal away the ability we have to see the richness in life and leave us in a sort of darkness.
I have been reading "The Bliss List" and yesterday, it began pulling me out of my funk. This morning, I again dove into my favorite book, "Wonder- Moments that keep you falling in love with life" and I came even closer to getting back to normal. I have no secrets other than to simply endure such times for a bit until I feel the need to turn to those whose writings lift me up.
Still not completely there, I felt challenged to grab the old keyboard and hit a few keys to see what came out.
I facilitate weddings and have a number of them to do for this season. I write the ceremonies hoping to make them personal and memorable and that takes a great amount of time. I felt as if all I had been doing was sitting at the keyboard and needed to take a break. As I thought about the weddings, I realized what I love to do is write and the more I write, one would think the happier I would be. I guess I had some "poor me" going on which robbed me of my joy of writing.
I have a wedding renewal this weekend, it is D-Day weekend and I just realized it is the anniversary of my dad's death. That small observation encouraged me even more.
My dad was a very interested and gifted man. Stories indicate that he and his brother Bill were terrors in the small town they grew up in. Apparently, everyone knew who Rich and Bill were because they were always in one kind of mischief or another. Dad was the younger and died many years before his older brother. When Uncle Bill died, I just had this gnawing feeling that heaven would have it's hands full with those two!
Dad and my mom met when they were pretty youmg. Dad was in the Air Force, was athletic, and looked a bit like Paul Newman. He had a good build, a magnetic personality, and bright blue eyes. He seemed to always have a reddish tan no matter what the season. Having found out that his side of the family had Arapaho blood in it may explain the tan.
He was adventurous as the story goes. He was going through Illinois, sometime prior to 1949, on his way to Waco, Texas to report to an Air Force base there. He drove past a used car dealer and saw a Harley for sale. Dad had never been on a motorcycle before and his adventuring spirit got the best of him. In a short amount of time, he had traded his car for the bike and would spend the hundreds of miles from Illinois to Texas learning how to ride. One of my most treasured photos is one of me sitting on his bike, reaching for the throttle at a very young age. Reaching for the throttles was something I enjoyed doing when I started getting bikes of my own. I guess I owe my love of bikes to my dad.
He was an equipment operator and as I have heard, one of the best in Ohio. He could operate bulldozers, front end loaders, road graders and just about anything used in construction. His favorite was operating cranes. He used them to build bridges and all sorts of things. I had a fair amount of time, sitting alongside him while he worked and can still smell the grease and diesel fuel. I loved sitting in the hot sun on the crane's huge metal treads having lunch. He had the biggest arms of any dad I knew. I was proud of my dad.
Dad was always helping his friends or working on some project. He was very artistic and could paint with oils or draw with a pencil and it all looked great. A talent that never had a lesson. He was funny and liked to wrestle with me and life just seemed like a blast for him. I never saw him sad or depressed. I only once saw him angry and it was my fault, I mouthed off to my mom. Dad played the organ, the guitar, the harmonica, the mandolin, and the accordion. He taught himself how to do it all and never learned to read music. He could hear something and then play it. He even wrote a few tunes of his own. As with painting, he never had a music lesson.
Thinking back, we were great pals. I learned a lot from him and spent as much time with him as he had to give. We loved fast cars and almost anything mechanical. I loved his work and wanted to follow in his footsteps but he would have none of that. He felt it was too hard and unstable.
This weekend, with D-Day and the wedding I took a peek at my calendar and there written in on June 7th was the note that dad had died in 1994. That was 20 years ago. As the years have passed, I have seen more of his personality and habits show up in me and I have come to understand him a little bit more. He was 64, seemingly a bit young to die.
What is strange is that I am the same age he was when he died. What is not strange is that he is still in my heart and is still missed. I cannot help but wonder what our conversations would be like now. I wonder if he would be proud of me or if I would have fallen short. I wonder what he would look like and if he would be happy.
Twenty years have passed in a blink but in reality, nearly a third of my lifetime. How quickly it goes and I wonder how much of it is wasted on things that really don't matter or have value. For me, today is a good day to reflect on how I am living my life and spending my time. Obviously, I have wasted a month of it feeling sorry for myself. I have wasted a month that I can never reclaim. Gone it is, forever. Gone are the potential memories, joys and experiences, laughter and tears. Gone is a month of living whatever life had to offer, good or bad.
If sixty-five years have gone fast, how much faster will the next twenty pass? ... if I even last that long. I guess today brought a wide awakening of how precious and short a lifetime is. It has reminded me that a lifetime is different for each of us. Some pass away while they are still little ones and others when their years are written with three digits. "Seize the moment," "Carpe diem," and other such phrases try to warn us that time is short and we need to make the best of the days we have.
I often reflect on the fact that death is the one and only thing we are positive we will experience and it is the one and only thing we seem to live life thinking it will not happen to us.
Perhaps, we need to think longer and choose wiser about what we do, what we value and what we think. Take it from me, one day we will all wake up and wonder where time has gone.