Change Now?

That’s it, I’m making some changes. I don’t WANT to feel like Sisyphus pushing the same rock up the same hill every day. (See yesterday's.)  Back in ’08 when I began writing this blog in earnest, I said I would post every day and it was huge for me the first time I skipped a day. Who am I disappointing? was all I could think. I trained as teacher and began adult  life in the classroom. It would be like just not being there when the kids showed up. Eventually, though, I was given to understand that even famous bloggers take the weekend off, so I started doing that around last summer.But then this last Sunday night I went to bed with nothing at all dreamed up for Monday morning’s post and I knew I couldn’t write it at 7 and put it up at 8. The morning hours for me have always been for the newspaper column that I've been writing since 1980 and I know if I start writing crummy columns, people WOULD be disappointed and they would be the editors of those newspapers and that would be the end of THAT career.So now here I am wandering the house in my nightie between 6am and 7:00, watering the plants and looking at the sky and watching the small figures of commuters hurrying to catch the train into Boston.It feels odd. It’s scary when you feel yourself changing.For the the last ten years since our last child flew the nest I would write every day for two hours, THEN eat, THEN go to some damn gym at 9:00 in the morning.It took me years to realize I was mostly sitting outside the gym, reading old Time magazines and writing in my diary, and on lucky days scribbling down sweet things I saw out my car window, like when a squirrel would sneeze, or one of those parochial-school girls would pause in the alley before going into the building to hike her skirt up a foot above the knee.I got so I hated the gym, yet it took my years to cancer my membership. Even today if I never see another Nautilus machine it will be too soon.Now I go to the Y. At 10am instead of 9am and it makes all the difference.I still hurry right past even the treadmills and just do the dance classes. I look at the faces of the other ‘dancers, ’ all of them lit with the joy you get when you move to some music. Zumba alone!  Little did I think I could do those mambo moves, a stick-in-the-mud wonk like me who looked while dancing like one of the extras from The Walking Dead! Sped-up stumbling: that’s what my moves were.I know I’ll keep going to the Y. God knows I need to keep moving, but beyond, that my days are  changing. I can feel another rhythm trying to get established.Suddenly I just want to sit on that sunny window seat and read my book.I want to write more notes to people going through hard times. I want to sit beside my husband and try to figure out from him what sanity feels like.I don’t want to be writing bleak limericks in my head at 5am, wasting that first fresh hour of wakefulness just so some fool looking for dirty rhymes can happen upon my blogWell, we'll see if I can make the changes stick. I sure hope I can. It's exhausting to be my brand of crazy.