nudnik

This morning someone asked me by the by how I was. I said I was in 'mustn't grumble' mode and we both laughed. Only a nudnik* answers a question like that in a fulsome and truthful way. And anyway I do not properly know how I am, all I know is that I am on that Mickey Mouse precipice again. Or am I being disingenuous, even to myself? I am - or was, at any rate, for several years - a trained bereavement counsellor. I know how when someone dies weird things happen. But it is only today that I have articulated to myself that this present weirdness is the bereavement kind - a very particular bespoke kind, as it always is. Not helpful to speak in terms of generalities, and this person that is gone from me and the world is hard to put a label on. He was an erstwhile stepfather but that says very little - and very little is what I want to be saying. So here I am saying it. But sometimes it is best just to bow with a small flourish and go back behind the curtain.

Back anon - when I can lay my hands on the red nose that I seem to have mislaid and when I have dedided what the hell costume to wear. Not to mention remembered my lines.

*nudnik - someone who if you ask them how they are, they tell you. Yiddish, obviously.

blogzen

A fellow blogger of my acquaintance has set herself the task of putting up a post a day. It is day two and she is already cursing – this is good, shows the zen is kicking in because hey, when the resistance manifests you know what you’re up against. I should be so lucky. Wait, what am I saying? Well first off I have never been much bothered by having nothing to say and could fill up screens and screens of words all about the saying of it – the nothing, I mean. But my courage fails me. Here, I think, my blog friend has the edge. For before you can even say John Cage I have taken the nothing by the scruff of the neck and turned it into something – in other words, reader, I chicken out: I wriggle, I contort, I think about what’s for breakfast tomorrow and there is no zen master to come and tap my spine, or whatever it is that they do, to bring me back to the nothing that my monkey mind is busy trying not to address.

But on the other hand there is always Shrink. My words fall into his cavernous etheric space and as far as I’m concerned this is as good as a hefty dose of zen for we are brought back to the nothing more times than I would care to count. And in the nothing there is always the something which is deeply and unutterably mysterious, or it is deeply and mysteriously unutterable, or it is the dog’s bollocks, but we have to go on because we are committed to the Process.

And sometimes one lacks a little in the Commitment department.

I thank you.