The Simple Things

I was one of those people that believed that the sweet, simple things in life made putting up with the rest of the BS all worth it.  I was able to pick up on smells and sights and sounds that filled me with a sense of peace and all around fuzzy-wuzzies without changing gears; meaning that I did it naturally, out of habit, without forcing myself to think about my surroundings and if there was anything good that could come from it.  The smell of lilacs in the spring.  The sound of frogs mixed with the scent of the fresh rain after a storm.  Cut grass and the feel of it under my feet in the early summertime.  A gentle touch of the hand between an older couple.  Muddy kitten prints on my car from my barn cats when I leave for work in the morning.  The fresh air in the country filled filling my nose with the smell of pine needles or the crunch of dried leaves in the late fall.

I cherished all of these things and kept them dearly close to my heart.  They made me feel that the world was predominately good and that the bad things that happened in it were few and far between.  I felt that if I could cut and paste these moments in time and sew them all together with a few fancy words that my writing would be endearing, poised, poetic and the masses would weep as they threw flowers onto the streets before me.  Sigh.

Alas, my writing was not only not good enough to capture the calm and sense of harmony that these clippings of experience life had given to me, I came to realize that my writing had suffered as a whole.  There was no meat, no plot, no grit that made it stick the reader's psyche.  I wanted to work on incorporating meaning and the overall reality that most people have to deal with in their everyday lives, but, as chance should have it, life decided to show me just how uneducated about life I really was.

Things in life get....complicated.  Times got rough.  Then they got worse.  Then better.  Then really bad.  I was so preoccupied with just trying to survive that I gave up on writing and I lost the ability to see those magic moments in life that were supposed to make all that I was going through worth going through.

When I finally worked my way back to my writing, I noticed it had become "old" and "bitter".  We all change and when we change so does our writing style.  So now, here I sat.  I had lost the innocence that had been my previous self and had journeyed to the other end of the spectrum.  My stories were dark and dreary, and were no better received than the pink fluff I was putting out years earlier.

I am still writing, striving towards the finish line of this book, jotting notes in my notebook reminding myself that when I do my revisions, I need to dig deep into my memories and sprinkle in lost rays of hope and sunshine that belong in a story about real things that happen to real people.  I've also come to the realization that those magical moments in life are not to counterbalance the misery you go through, but the misery is there so we can appreciate the magic.