I suppose we all have something that we want to keep up. It might be writing in a journal, doing a sketch each day or a painting each week. For you, is it jogging? Yoga? Weeding the garden? Volunteering? Visiting your Gramma weekly? ‘Keeping up’ with something/anything is an invented internal pressure; don’t you think? It’s a story we tell ourselves. Does anyone else want us to keep up?
It’s possible that the concept of keeping up began with the coining of the term, Keeping Up With the Joneses, an idea that had more to do with a person trying to reach a different social status. We’ve all heard of the t.v. series, Keeping Up With the Kardashians…something else, all together. If a person scans the internet, they will find a huge number of references to ‘keeping up’ and so more and more I discover that children are over-scheduled during the school year, parents are over-committed, exercise programs lack variety, painting becomes work, diet programs become unhealthy and expensive and society, in general, loses focus on much of the magic that surrounds.
The wonder of minutia disappears because no one can see the ‘ordinary’ when life’s responsibilities get in the way.
What does one do when one does not keep up?
Most on my mind at this very moment is the idea of where to begin my writing after these months away. I’ve been absent to my blog for the duration of my father’s visit. It’s been a priority for me to soak up every minute of our time together and in doing so, there are many subjects that I hope, over the next long while, to write about. Our visit has been a rich and important experience that I will always cherish. So, where to begin?
Perhaps the idea is to simply begin to write, free of any/all expectations and not concerned with any particular order. There is something about ‘ordering’ our thoughts, paintings, sketches and writings that makes ‘beginning again’ tricky. The next number of posts will be random explorations. Each post will be a container, storing small pieces of memory. Why? Hmmm…well, that’s another question. I’ve tried to explain to family and friends the why-of-it, this obsession of mine, but with no luck. For now, I am just following my bliss.
As always Kathleen you offer much food for thought and offer it beautifully. Yes, ‘keeping up’ can become an obsession in which we lose ourselves and the simple glory of the everyday world. I hear and understand your reflections but believe you have your priorities right where they should be. What is more important than spending every precious moment with dad….