A Bear of Very Little Brain

"You sir, are stuck. A wedged bear in a Great Tightness. In a word, irrrremovable!"

So says Owl to Pooh Bear, who has become a more or less permanent part of Rabbit's domicile entry. 

http://youtu.be/DpUfAS-FfaI

Much like our poor bear-of-very-little-brain, my words are stuck. In a word, they are irremovable. I want to write, but there's nothing. Not that ideas don't cross my mind, but they don't want to be written. It's a curious state of mind freeze.

The curious part is I'm not totally sure why. Now usually, in such cases, I know. I do have a theory or two duking it out for supremacy in the back. Let's parade them out --

1) I have three jobs.

One is new and starts tomorrow morning. Not much more to say.

2) This is a latent, or fallow, phase. Stewing. Like stew, so much better when it has sat for awhile and blended flavours. 

3) It's winter, I'm cold, and the creative parts of my brain are actually and literally frozen. 

4) Too much on the mind. Like Pooh Bear, all that extra weight has made movement a challenge. 

5) In my sleep, aliens came and took my brain. (Yes. Dumb...but aliens come up a lot in queries about odd circumstances; I had to give them their due.)

I'm inclined to go with number 3, at the moment, as my fingers are too cold to type properly. POrpreyl. PrORylpy. Whetvevar!

At any rate, no one cares, except if anyone has noticed the space of days between this blog and the last one and it's keeping them up nights. Which I doubt. So I decided, in the meantime (while the aliens are experimenting) to just give a brief update on what life is like at the moment for us. 

An Average Day

6:30 Dylan wakes up. This is my cue to sprawl and sigh and hog all of the covers and pillows for a blissful 20 minutes. I like to rush when I get ready. 

8:00 I leave for work at the dining hall, or starting tomorrow, continue getting beautiful for my new job as an EA in the preschool, which commences at 8:30. 

8:15  The possibility of yelling goes up exponentially, as all family members are scrambling to find things that were "RIGHT THERE" last night, things that Someone Had to Have Taken, essential elements like pants, or socks, or lunches or musical instruments. 

8:25 Somehow we have all left. Keegan is at his school, Lauren is walking up the steps in the high school, and Dylan is looking for his favorite seat near the exit of a college classroom. I am in my fabulously classy uniform, black pants/brown shirt/white or black apron/black cap, making dollars where there were none before. 

12:30  If it's Thursday, I am heading to my downstairs music room at the Arts Academy, lugging books and bag and purse and a large tea. I will emerge at 5:20 and pray that That Guy I live with remembered to pick up the kids from school and get them to their various after school events. (To his credit, he remembers 4 times out of 5, which is not bad.)

3:30 One of us adults picks up the kids from school. In warmer weather walking and biking were involved, but now we cower behind frosty windshields and crank the tunes to bolster our strength.

Both schools let out at the same time. 

...

I hold my peace.

5:30 - 6:30  Supper happens. I have no recollection of how, or what we ate, or who made it, but the endless ritual takes place. Sometimes all four of us are present. And often we even have a good time!

7:00  Dylan generally disappears after supper to be scholarly, and I dissolve into a sort-of coma. Yes, I do things, but they are too random to explain. Also there is a taxi service that I provide, about every half hour, for scandalously little pay. 

8:30  Either Keegan is being coerced into having a shower, threats and all, or we are trying to gather for family devotions. Both have a similar cadence, I must admit. We are well aware that the family is always being pulled apart. Rather than just sigh and chock it up to modern life, we have to fight the tide. Make ourselves put down whatever screen we are looking at, and sit together, talk, pray, read the Bible, argue a bit, and try somehow to keep the raft from drifting over the falls. It's sink or swim, or float; if we stick together hopefully no one will be lost overboard. 

10:30  Drag my weary self to bed. Did I exercise today? Perhaps. Most likely I felt about 100 years old and after tripping on the elliptical and cracking my chin I decide to just let nature have its way. We are all dying off - why prolong it? Do I really need to fit into those old jeans? They are so last century anyway. Sleep, now that's what this body needs. 

11:30 This is more likely the correct time that I go to sleep. Or start trying to sleep. (It's a process!)

An average day. I've left out all the good parts, the important parts, like chatting with a new friend, meeting a student, hugging my beautiful daughter. Dancing to some song when no one is looking, being a goof. Speaking truth, learning Life. Thinking. 

My heart keeps beating, though broken and cracked in places, raw from overuse, like the sore, strong hands of a carpenter at the end of a long workday. Still beating. And breaking. And healing. 

Though so much has changed for us this year, I'm guessing my day isn't that different from yours in a lot of ways. 

Simply carrying on like the old hymn, "I'm pressing on the upward way/new heights I'm gaining every day/...my goal, my aim is higher ground." 

Pooh and Piglet walked home thoughtfully together in the golden evening, and for a long time they were silent. 

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what's the first thing you say to yourself?”

“What's for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”

“I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting to-day?” said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It's the same thing,” he said.

From Winnie the Pooh, by A. A. Milne