Hope

“Man can live about forty days without food, about three days without water, about eight minutes without air, but only for one second without hope” (anon)

I read the song last night on the speakeasy after a mad hour of rewrites and adjustments to the text and...it went well. Really well. It is slightly and yet greatly different then what I posted in the blog earlier. Now....comes the part about figuring out how to film it.

I am working on the annotations first and from there I will craft the storyboard. I find that when I work that way, all structured and planned, it is the moment when I absolutely throw that plan out the window when something good happens. But without the plan, I am lost all willy nilly and its harder for things to come together. You should have seen the story board for the Requiem, I think, in the end, only about 25% of it survived to the final version but....they were the beginning, middle and end.

So organized...the I spent 3 hours last night working on the new feature (yes, no more green text - I promise) only to discover I was working on the wrong version. Ooops. Back to the beginning again.

And I woke up...absolutely depressed and dejected and wanting to just stop and give it all up. That was quite a few painful hours but I am coming out of it now. It took a walk, a cup of coffee and a chance encounter with a woman and a dog that looked so much alike...I couldn't help but smile from deep inside my funk.

And I realized that things are no more worse then they have ever been.
And that the greatest gift I could give to myself was some stability.

I don't think we realize how unstable most of our lives our and how that can effect our attitudes and anxieties. It is something that there is a passing awareness of - how much is in the bank? How long could I keep my home if it went south? How long do I have to live? But its there...eating at us. Add into the mix any other unknowns - be they new ventures or relationships or dreams and everything gets ramped up. It becomes easy to grab at something for a sense of security.

One of the reasons that episodic television shows are so successful is that they provide an anchor in people's lives. Every Weds at 8pm they know what is going to happen. Even if technically they don't, it has a sense of being reliable because it is contained.

I am beginning to realize the importance of having anchor points in my life. Things that I can rely on to happen (but possibly not rely on to always be there if that makes sense). In the life that I lead, which is sort of a hyper-condensed version of normal instability - what with freelancing and renting et al, I am seeing that I need more of these things on a daily basis to keep me from feeling overwhelmed.

It's as simple as eating breakfast at the same time everyday.
Knowing you are going to read in the evening.
Looking forward to every thursday to listening to a poetry show because even if the rest of life goes blooie around me and I can't make it, I know it still happened and is there waiting for me to come listen to it when I have recovered my balance.

Life is...ever changing. The world, the earth, is in constant motion. The notion of being able to stand perfectly still is an illusion - the reality is learning how to remain upright while spinning is how we live.


Chapter 2: The Universal Stick


c.2000-2010. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.