On Reflection

Lesley says: "I do hope that all is well."  She has noticed that I haven't posted since December.

My initial reaction is to send a quick reply "thank you for noticing and yes fine" but the reply wasn't sent, the weeks slip by and I ponder: perhaps all is not well?

Perhaps there is just a natural cycle for blog-writing.  Initial enthusiasm, a contented maturity and then a gentle decline.  I wrote far fewer blogs last year.  I'm a great starter of things and a lousy completer-finisher, running out of steam before the project is finished.  Then the gap between blogs becomes too great to start again. The habit of sitting at the keyboard to share my thoughts is lost.

So do I just thank my readers (reader) shut down and walk away?

And yet there is a niggle of regret.  I miss the writing: that looking for the well-chosen word, seeking to evoke a mood, capture a scene so that the reader is there with me.  This strange dual process of writing - the introverted, solitary act of placing words on the page juxtaposed with the extrovert arrogant assumption that someone, somewhere, is going to read what I have written.  Is the introvert in me saying "enough"?

And then there are all the stories not written, piling up in a mound of half-formed phrases 'til they become a jumbled writer's block - which story to post about? which phrase to pick out and work with?  Some of the stories are too personal, too raw, not mine to write about really and yet jamming my mind.  So better not to post at all.

Of course, there's the excuse of "too busy living this life to write about this life".  True, in a way, this last year for the first time we let the cottage as a paying gite and my anxiety about it all left little room for a well-thought few words at the end of the day.

And maybe the excited enjoyment of living in France has slipped away to become the mundane routine of the day to day - weeding, mowing, dusting, cooking, shopping - what is there to blog about there? My eyes no longer see the quirky, the unusual as I trudge through this life, head down.

Nine years on, we wonder about moving, concerned that we are becoming slaves to our life here - too much to do with all the land we have and the two properties to care for and pay for, yet loathe to leave our beautiful views and the space we have. So, for the moment we stay.

And I ponder some more: perhaps all is well and I have just lost sight of that in all the minutiae of our daily lives.

Thank you for asking Lesley. On reflection, I may just start blogging again.