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Every so often a black hole of life opens up and is so well camoflaged that we find ourselves falling into it without even having known it was there at all.  I’m a bit of an expert in black holes by this stage in my life and I’ve more than a few to my credit.  Credit?  Well, that’s what I give myself whenever I manage to crawl out of one.

One opened up the other day and I tumbled right in.  I should have known better, but, that’s just it.  They get you when you think you’re in the clear.  It starts with something small, like petty colleagues bickering, then that takes away time you’d needed for something else, so you feel cramped, rushed; you do less well at the tasks you’d set yourself, and - as event cannons off event, you suddenly see you’re in one of those holes.

There is only one way out, of course. I sat there thinking my brain was mush, my life a sorry series of missteps (and fill in the blanks as you wish) and that I’d never write a blog again. And that’s when the poetry of the dis-ease gave me the clue I needed.  Blog?  Write something? Now?  You’re joking!

So I began to write. Of course it wasn’t just that, but it was the dawning knowledge that I was feeling so caught and gloomy because I hadn’t made time to do any writing of my own.  Writing for others, yes.  Memos and emails for others, yes. For me, not even a shopping list.

Easily changed.  I dragged myself, complaining and protesting, to the keyboard. Had a few sharp words with the ego.  Told it exactly where to go, and not to return until bidden.  Then I knew what it was I had to do, settled in, and produced a bundle of pages for my next project.  It was on the topic of how to respond to a reading, which may not sound like much fun, but I realized as I was whacking away at the keyboard that I was putting my whole life as a reader down, assessing it in an entirely new way.  Now, I’ve been reading since I was about 5, so it was astonishing how long overdue this process was for a spot of reflection.

It was a very rough draft.  That’s fine.  As I scanned over it I knew something had arrived. And I greeted it like sunrise. I didn’t have to climb out of the blcak hole.  I just had to recognize that there never was a black hole at all, just a delusion of my own making.

The wisdom’s always there, waiting for us to shut up, be still, and let it come to us.