By Purpose & Passion: Connecting the Dots

If all great changes are preceded by chaos, this is going to be epic.

My well-roundedness can sometimes be lost in translation. This is the thought pattern that occurs as I perch; the glorified receptionist whose brain and exuberance are metastasizing. With each phone call that comes through, I answer with less enthusiasm than the one before it; counting the tick-tick-tock of state issued equipment. I write, I think, I paint, sketch, pray, plan and scheme while working – yet, I am not complete until I go home. “Don’t gripe or complain” the voice o’er my left side calls – “you’re working while a majority of the population is unemployed”.


“But don’t forget,” comes the right, “that every day you’re not doing what you should be, you are losing time that you will never get back”. The arguing and logic lines continue like this for some time until one or the other gives in to economic reasoning. The economics of it dictate that I continue working to continue working. My illusions of grandeur shrivel to a pile of well-formed, yet slow-to-implement remnants of what I should be doing. And at some point of my reckoning I succumb to perspective – keeping oddly positive about those situations clearly out of my control. Like the dried remnants…with a shift of perspective they garner new light as dehydrated intentions. So, in essence, they are simply in storage until the timing correlates with the water supply in order to bring those intentions back to life.

Meanwhile, I am eluding the happenstances that squeeze the energy and vitality from my limbs. It is not that I have no plans – only that I have far too many for a day. A new moon occurred just the other day as I was busy stoking the stove. It is as if each time I turn around, someone has grown or moved, or is in the process of transitioning to something, someone or to somewhere else.

I am standing still.

It passes too quickly and not fast enough.

Relevance of the Score Keeper

Initially, the idea was to weigh happenstances against experience and decipher enough of the situation to tell if I had progressed. In theory, the idea was manageable – upon initiation however, it is proving quite difficult. The lines of reference are skewed to allow for only small portions of progress when I really feel like I am walking backwards, instead of forward.

And so, I am contemplating.

Contemplation always seems to help in some manner. Life perspective is a multistep scenario: see it. Process it. Implement it. Allocate the outcome by screening out the troublesome. I am, I believe – looped in the processing stage. A lot. What this amounts to is that I keep score against myself rather than for myself; an epiphanial-tragedy. That is what I shall deem this exercise of a thought-provoked existence. Epiphanial-tragedy. I get a great idea and make dire efforts toward initiating or implementing it for myself or family, and then …I falter. So in essence, the score-keeping is the marked effort that is in fact, holding me back.

In an essence, our daily processing becomes the start of a new story every day while altering the ending as we go; an endless do-over opportunity. The magic however, is in the act of letting go of the process; the score-keeping and enabling that whole “like begets like” action to occur by putting out there what we want to get back. My mother would often say that “the more you give, the more you get,” which to the ten-year-old, insinuated the physical giving: clothes, belongings, money. The same is true for the metaphysical – love, care, energy – these elements when given, bring more of the same in return. And how does one plagued with the epiphanial-tragedy keep score against that? Instead of a savings account, it is an investment portfolio chock full of high-yield eternal stocks.

It’s like country singer Dwight Yoakam emphasized in his song, Waterfall: “my heart still believes that love for what we need, can be enough”. It can and is enough – so long as the tally marks don’t form alongside the action. And with that, we do have an everything.