"I don't seize my days as much as they seem to seize me …"

I must have been born before my time. This world was no more ready for my arrival than I was ready to meet up with it. The world seems to have been playing catch-up since the day I was born. I've tried slowing down, honestly I have, but the world seems dedicated to tailing me, leaving me to cut the sea ice to ease its weary way. I don't mind. I'm uncertain if I could follow tail lights even if I'd ever found any out in front of me. A few years after I've lost interest in what was once a new phenomenon for me, here comes the world just waking up to that item's existence. The fabulously fresh by then seems simply old hat, for I'm off in some newly uncharted direction, making most of it up as I go along.

I have my traditions. I try to follow the rules, but the rules don't often seem all that clear to me. I'm the guy who didn't see the sign. I'm the one who never suspected, and also the one who might appear to have neglected observing some sacred ritual. These experiences might serve as evidence that I was poorly acculturated, and I freely admit to that searing omission. I did not pay close enough attention when the underlying tenets were first described. I was probably transcribing some fresh creation I'd caught popping out of my eyes when I was supposed to have been paying close attention to what the principal said. My attention was not so much deficient, but absent without formal leave. I was not trying to please anyone else.

I have lately concluded that I'll likely never learn. I won't even consider myself qualified to sign up for the class. It's my ass on the line and always has been. I poke sticks into utter darkness. The roadmaps seem to lack a You Are Here point, so I wander almost aimlessly, avoiding the major highways as altogether too already discovered. I will most certainly uncover some previously unimagined route, one almost nobody else would have ever considered a route until I returned to tout it. "How did you find that?" they'll ask. I'll reply that it just seemed to have been looking for me.

I don't seize my days as much as they seem to seize me, quite often seizing me up more than propelling me forward. I have always felt deeply uncertain, lurking along to one side. I am not hiding there, but simply trying to orient myself, to see what I might be stepping into before I'm up to my elbows in gumbo. I do not know what I'm up to or really where I must be going, just that I am going, moving slightly ahead of a world within which I was born well before my time. I, like you, never asked to be here. I find myself here, anyway, wandering around back roads grateful for the absence of competing traffic. I simply must have been born before my time.

©2019 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #NuthinSpecial, #PureSchmaltz