shut down to a whisper…

The past three days I have sat down to write and words have ceased to come across the page.

I type and it’s as if there is a disconnect between my keys and the screen. The words aren’t there. They fail to appear even as my fingers click the keys.

And then I realize, I am not actually typing. The words in my brain are incomprehensible. Like a pinball machine with too many marbles bouncing around, I am incapable of coordinating my thoughts, feelings, fingers, keyboard, and computer screen to produce the end result I’m aiming for…and my ball drops through the hole.

Right now I am watching little fingers build a motorcycle out of legos. Page by page. Step by step. His little fingers have slowly pieced this thing together.

It seems so simple. Step by step instructions with only the necessary pieces that you need available. But there was a point where he was stuck. He couldn’t figure out how to make this one part look like the picture in the manual did. And I couldn’t figure it out either. We were stuck.

It was not until we went back three pages and started over that things began to make sense.

Back tracking. Sometimes you have to go back a few steps for things to make sense.

And sometimes…they simply do not make sense. 

I’ve been pondering the simple nine days I spent in Africa. For just nine days I felt like the world made sense. My “spiritual umbilical cord” (as my spiritual direction prof called it) was directly plugged into the Right spiritual source, I knew my mission, I knew our purpose as a team. There were questions and unknowns of course, but they paled in comparison to the certainties that lied at my feet.

Nine days. That was all I was allotted. 

Things are never that simple in “real” life. Of course, we are the reason that things aren’t simple. We muddy the water. We doubt when we should be confident. We fear when should be brave…cower when we should be courageous. Cry when we should laugh. Question when we should simply live. 

And sometimes things are simply fuzzy. Grey. 

Things are not black and white.

We live in a world of grey space where colors shift, puddle, and pool to take different forms and figures. 

And so…we’re left in the grey. 

The grey…where complimentary colors are added or subtracted to form…grey.

And there we sit…where we can choose to add or subtract…every day

I leave you with this. 

a whisper.