Today is my someday~

Some days I get tired of myself, my thoughts. I just want to turn them off and drift in an empty headed haze, lie down with a book and get lost in someone else's thoughts for a change. Lately between writing and taking pictures, I've been living too closely to my own thoughts, too intensely involved.

I take a walk, and I see pictures everywhere-- in a wide-open scene of trees and sky, or a small spot of sunlit color in a hidden berries. I stop and snap and move on always seeing more, more, more.

I used to walk with no other purpose than to exercise-- fast-paced, sweaty and cathartic-- but I can't do that anymore for some reason. There is beauty everywhere. I want to capture it. Need to.

I used to go to bed with a book. I wandered in another world until I fell asleep, and the book slipped aside. Now I stay up later than I should, focused on my own inner world, writing down my thoughts and observations. For some reason, I need to do this, and I want to, but I miss the time away from myself I got from a book.

I took a walk on the college campus the other day. It's a beautiful campus, more expansive than when I attended. New buildings, new dorms, and a new wall-- more decorative than functional -- caught my eye.

Engraved in the concrete was a saying by Horace Mann, an early education reformer: "Coiled up in this institution as in a spring, there is a vigor whose uncoiling may wheel the spheres."

It struck a chord in me. I love the language, and the image-- a vigorous student body coiled together, ready to move the planets.

But it spoke to me in a different way. "There is a vigor within you, too," it said. "A spring is uncoiling and prodding from within, making you restless, keeping you awake, keeping you wired, when you'd rather drift.

I always had vigor. I didn't squander it; I merely used it to survive. Now I can use it for something else. For my "someday" plans: someday I'll write, someday I'll travel, someday I'll . . .

I stopped after school at the Better Bean, the family owned coffee shop in the center of town. There is a small back room where local artists display their work.

"Is there a schedule for the back room," I asked the owner.

"Are you an artist?" he asked.

"No," I said. "Well, I . . . I'm a photographer. That's an artist of sorts."

"It is," he said.

He'll schedule the back room for me next time I go in, when he has his book.

This is my "someday." When I let the spring uncoil, who knows what spheres I'll wheel.
~~~~~
"The future has a way of arriving unannounced." George Will