Avoiding the hole in the road

Original Post

My lack of blogging over the past weeks has been due to some extreme focus on writing a paper that has taken my interest. I love being focused and interested; instead of getting caught up in family's and friends' drama I can retreat into my own world of thinking.

Whilst this may sound really boring to some people, it serves me a a kind of gestation time, an incubation of my thinking process where I can be quiet and alone and consider ideas that may, one day, be woven onto the fabric of my external life.

It's been a strange couple of months preceding this, with lots of difficulty and joy, being let down and realising people are not what they seem to be. Lot's of moving around outdated areas of my life to make room for the future, which looks very, very bright. So, instead of constantly going back over old things, reliving learned helplessness and old patterns, I am making my own new patterns. Making these new patterns depends a lot on whether you listen to other people's advice and to yourself.

Years ago someone gave me an anonymous poem (it was passed to me as anonymous, but I now realise it was based on Portia Nelson's 'Autobiography in Five Short Chapters') and it is still relevant today when culling the dead wood.

Edit notes 18th April 2011 Many thanks to the reader who left a comment below. It's interesting because when I wrote this blog I was working from my own memory of this poem, and from notes I took, at a time when I was working very hard to change my life. The comment relates to my not giving credit to the author, which of course I will do immediately. The poem was 'Autobiography in Five Short Chapters' by Portia Nelson. However, my own interpretation of this poem, through the lens of time and personal experience, and maybe even forgetfulness and sadness, has been mistaken for a misquote, and I will remove my own interpretation of this poem on this post, but not from my heart; this was how it filtered through my consciousness when applied to myself, an example of how memory can sometimes distort words to provide personal comfort - and perhaps exactly what the author intended.