Vincent van Gogh: Paysan de la Camargue [Peasant of the Camargue, Portrait of Patience Escalier] (1888)

"We do not live in lines."

I just "lost" my first hour of writing. I hadn't managed to do that in years. I'd grown careful and cautious. As one who measures my progress in captured words, I never approach my work in a cavalier fashion. I tend to be deliberate to a fault, following patterns varying little from session to session. I set up my page before setting to work, saving often, as if sighing. This morning, I must have forgotten to sigh. I inadvertently sorted my collection of stories by something other than the usual Date Created. I had not anticipated that I could have sorted them by Title instead, and there's only a tiny checkmark in the corner of the column label to indicate that the underlying list has even been sorted.

The list made no sense. This story, AheadOfMyself, stood on top, followed by a story from last April, which was dutifully followed by one from last May. Then came one from February of 2006, one of the first dozen stories I posted on this blog. Then came eight entries dated earlier this year before another from 2006, then two more from this year before another from 2006. I'd forgotten in that moment that I'd suppressed posting the thousands of stories I'd posted between 2006 and 2024 because the processing overhead was killing my updating time. I saw what made no sense. I imagined in my stunned silence that I'd somehow erased most of my life's work, that a random sampling remained. I thoughtlessly quit without saving. I had been three-quarters of the way toward posting and in the middle of a better-than-middling story about discovering myself AheadOfMyself this morning.

The universe decided to demonstrate what I'd been trying to explain. It apparently needed me to experience the difference between describing and living what I'd described. After restarting the application, I awoke to find my latest creation, the only item absent from the blog's master list. Restarting had reset the list sort to its usual order. I'd lost nothing but my mind for a moment. I imagined my actual worst-case scenario. I'd experience a mild reminder of what happens when I fall too far behind or presume myself into being even a little bit AheadOfMyself. It's possible in this world to drop out of sync with oneself. This state might be a blessing, for how boring it would certainly be if we all stayed in a single, strict sequence, our past, past, and our future before us.

Variety usually manages to take the better of me, but then I awaken to a fresh appreciation that what I'd earlier imagined had not really been holding me hostage. I observe my rituals for decent enough reasons. The care and caution I usually observe emerged from a few imagined catastrophes. Never the worst-case scenario yet, but that one's never entirely out of the question. When I get a ways AheadOfMyself, the universe seems to muster methods to bring me back down and into focus. These often feel like punishments, cleverly employed to leave a deep enough impression that I won't frequently stumble into them again. I gain a fresh appreciation of the craft I engage in, mundane as its finest points often seem. I faunch at the harness sometimes before I notice that without it, I'd make little progress. Of course, progress remains an illusion, like getting Ahead Of Myself or behind. We do not live in lines. Grace defines the N-dimensional space we find ourselves working within.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

The list made no sense

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz