I’m sorry. I’m a few minutes late.
What’s going on?
Ah, nothing. I mean, I’m tired. Today had a mind of its own.
Days often do.
Yeah, it would seem so… I just wanted to get the things done that I had planned.
It happens. What stopped you? Were you able to clear things up so that tomorrow, perhaps you can stay on track with your plans?
You see, that’s the thing about days with minds of their own. There’s no telling. If I get everything out of the way, it’s still left to be determined. They are non-committal that way, those days, or I am to them.
Right about the days, and you? What do you feel you’re not committed to, or that you’d instead be promised to doing?
I don’t want to be responsible for the external pull that drags energy from me and diverts attention to everything else. The daily minutia is so goddamn important, isn’t it to our survival? The rotten details in every aspect of living and not being. I want to be. Myself! Not selfish, but existing wholly, which I can’t seem to do with the pull, this way, that way, the needs and wants from everything and anyone else.
Did someone ask you to do these things for them today?
No.
So, why did you feel obligated?
It’s an internal struggle—a self-induced argument with my conscience—pressure to be perfect. I want to be, and simultaneously am resentful. I don’t want to care, not about my thoughts, or the dirty counters, the slippers left under the table, a dirty stovetop, or the dog wanting to go out for the third time. Most of all, I can’t bear to think of anyone else’s judgment in the case it isn’t all done.
Would they judge you?
I don’t know. Maybe. I mean sometimes silently, or by their martyr act. I know that I resent anyone else’s implication that I’m not up to par.
I think that’s more your internal dialogue and the things you’ve been made to feel, the tags assigned to you that hold no real truth.
I agree. Maybe I can have a tag sale.
Gentle laughter–Maybe you can.
Tell me what you’d like to be doing? If you could remove the distractions.
I’d live! I’d have fun doing everything that I want with zero roadblocks. I’d be free and perfect at the same time. Yes! I could find a place for everything, then all I’d have to do is maintain. I could stop worrying all of the time. I’d sleep like a baby and wake up years younger. I’d have time each day to breathe, not the way I do now with doubt or hopelessness, but empowered! I could silence the things that do not serve me. I would see myself in the mirror and be sure it was me looking back. There would be so much space that I could come alive, not the way someone said I ought to be, but the way I was meant to be.
I see. Thank you. You do have a beautiful way of expressing yourself. Perhaps your creativity is repressed by your expectations of being something or someone you cannot be to please a phantom.
Yes, the phantom ever-present within me because I care enough to listen. That’s my downfall—a need to please, to be validated.
Did I tell you, my muse has woken? She was angry with me for giving into fear and filling my world with clutter to mask the heartache.
No, you hadn’t mentioned it. I’m happy to hear if, as a muse, she is serving you.
Yes. I found her while taking my daily walks. She’s, of course, supplying me with incredible ideas far from anywhere I could write them down. But something happened last Tuesday.
What is that?
I was walking along my way when suddenly I was captured by a beam of sunlight perfectly situated on a green leaf on a low tree branch that I was passing beneath. It was so much more than what I describe. It was Omnipotent. I’m confident because time stopped, and I was given a gift of relief and clarity. It seemed possible that I could cross over into another dimension. I was overcome for seconds in pure joy, the kind unimagined or impossible in this life. I wanted to own the feeling forever but was left with only its memory.
Wow. That was certainly a powerful experience. What, if anything, did you take from it outside of the few moments of joy and their memory?
The knowledge that freedom exists to be truly happy. It’s a matter of believing, I could be or do anything, even on days with minds of their own.
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