Returning Awareness...

I have a bad history with summer. Usually when things fall apart for me, it's in the summer and it seems to fall apart harder than ever. I'm beginning to think that it was always a matter of perception - time stretches in the summer, the days last for years and the months go by like a week. Now that I have little time for anything, I have the feeling that all this period of my life will be a constant summer - but I haven't really had anything that could fall apart on me.

Hell, the only thing that's really gotten to me was the cat dying (yeah - the dogs got it), but beyond that everything else has been just static.

But summer has always been a personal autumn - things just seemed to end. Relationships, strings of ok news, and the like would always get claimed just around the time I didn't have anything else going on except the weird, seasonal ennui. But this year, I don't know. I have a new job, went on a date - all stuff that is fairly well out of the norm for me. I'm even waking up at an unreasonable hour - but for a reason. It's all new and a little scary for me - I still have no sense of direction in terms of where I'm going, but that's nothing new. The new part is, I have a scheduled time to worry about it.

For as much as I'd like to like this new phase of my life, nothing 'new' is ever completely good. I'm having trouble acclimating to the a lot of the changes, even the stuff I like. I'm not ever sure if I want to pursue writing under a pseudonym, or if I should just scrap it all and fill up my hours some other way. After years of being mildly obsessed with clocks, I feel the pressure of time now more than ever. Even setting aside two hours a night has become quite the task as I pick and choose things to no longer do.

But still, I do find it a little thrilling in a dull kind of way - change happens and we have to change with it. And I think I'm up to the challenge, except the challenge keeps shifting on me - every new change has multiple challenges, and a few of them I haven't even guessed at.

Some of the new challenges are nice though.

Time will tell, I guess.