I hated Saul Bellow's "Dangling Man" when I first read it because it was uncomfortably familiar. At the time, it made me alternately bored and anxious. Today I am dangling like Bellow's somewhat pathetic anti-hero Joseph. Waiting, waiting, waiting, no forward motion. Never been any good at that anyway. Compound that with a little PMS and a malaria medication with a side effect of depression. Oh yeah.
I guess I love that book now, because all these years after reading it, that quietly terrifying place it took me is surprising still a vivid memory. Recognizing it makes me know it passes and it is not really even special or noteworthy. It just passes.
It's a state of drowning in the freedom I asked for, of living ridiculously trapped in the doom of imagining the worst possibilities.
Floating. Dangling. Just a matter of perception. Hopefully the wind turns me to face a different sky and it starts feeling like floating again.
2 comments:
Use this time to just stop and soak in what's right in front of you. Soak in the feeling of the first days of fall. Soak in the quiet of the house. Soak in the routines around you, the little things you usually overlook. Just take these days and FEEL life around you.
Too soon you will be busy again, moving forward, with no time to stop and feel what is around you at this moment.
Okay, not to minimize, but I HAVE to be totally irreverent here and quote Forrest Gump. It's the one phrase that comes to mind every time I see your title:
"That was the summer Jenny taught me how to dangle."
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