Au contraire, Mr. Gump

 

If one has a box of chocolates these days, it’s a choice between choosing not to know what you’re going to get or opting to read the description that comes along with the box. I’m the latter type. Someone must’ve been assigned/employed to create those descriptions so I might as well read them. If I get disappointed with the chocolate I chose, I can share the blame with the description and not just my reckless whim. That wasn’t nice, eh? Hehe, sorry. Anyway, happy holidays to you and see you in 2022.

The year’s end is nigh

from pexels.com

The abundant snow makes the neighbourhood look like a scene in grayscale monochrome until you see a pedestrian with either an orange, navy, or red beanie walking along the sidewalk. To quote the last four lines of Robert Frost’s ‘Good Hours’:

Over the snow my creaking feet

Disturbed the slumbering village street

Like profanation, by your leave,

At ten o’clock of a winter eve.

I recently borrowed a copy of the Penguin Classics 2015 publication of ‘The Road Not Taken and Other Poems: Robert Frost 100th Anniversary Edition’ from the public library. Lucky find. Mindful of the time, it’s 10:20pm…Christmas time…New Year’s eve…To all, a good night. 

maybe not grayscale after all

Will get there

 Photo by Egor Kamelevfrom Pexels

sigaw na hindi marinig

Parallel reality: true vocal chords barely producing any sound while false vocal chords vibrate as moral support to its true counterparts. Loss of sound is the tip of the iceberg. Escape. A namesake. An emblem. 

amateur factory

 

Eight beanies, seven scarves, and two phone pouches later…I’m still at it. I have started to knit as well—continental style, I’ve learned; where the working yarn is on the left side and I handle the needles like two butter knives on each hand. This relentless yarn manipulation is mentally relaxing but has become physically taxing. As expected, some potential wear and tear on joints, tense shoulders and lower back are all attributable to this new fixation. As I write this on my mobile phone to force myself to cease working on a project, I ask myself, why am I doing this? The gifts are all done and wrapped yet I go to bed and think of what to do next before I sleep. Again, why? The fact is that I don’t have to but I want to. Is it the sense of accomplishment after finishing a project? Or is it simply an activity to do in between things to do which are part of the normal daily agenda? Is it an escape, a distraction? Perhaps. A good and productive endeavour that is the path towards full fledged traditional grandmotherhood…on a rocking chair. 

bifurcations

 

Photo by James Wheeler from Pexels

Click to Play: The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost (via Poetry Foundation)

Read Along Here

Time, I’ve been passing time

…watching trains go by, all of my life. Lying on the sand watching sea birds fly…as Stephen Bishop’s classic song goes. It’s December already, friends. Already. Still a lot of unmet resolutions from the previous year, which were carried over from the year before that. Books I started that haven’t finished. Planned lifestyle changes that remain as plans.Things to let go that I still haven’t let go completely. Places to go that I’ve yet to visit. Many “so near yet so far” situations. Like parallel lines nanometers apart that may/will never intersect. Let’s just say that these potential regrets were generated like a carrot suspended on a string that’s dangling from a stick attached to my posterior that yours truly—a metaphorical rabbit—tirelessly chases day after day as some form of motivation to keep going. Such is life. On the topic of life, while taking a short walk outside yesterday I was listening to a brief podcast episode by Fr. Mike Schmitz of Ascension Presents who said that all the little moments of each day constitute a life. I previously mentioned Emily Dickinson once stating that “forever is composed of nows.” If we imagined both ideas as equations, both were adding up the same things. The distinction is that the previous adds up to something finite and the latter something infinite. Life: tangible. Forever: abstract. To be honest, both are hard to grasp. I probably shouldn’t waste this “little moment”…this “now” by being inside my head. Right? Right.