The Ilde Hermit

It feels really, really good to be lazy. Slowing down to the point where an entire day will contain the following: Read in bed, make a cake, walk the dog, do some dishes, watch tv, knit. It's marvelous, at least until I get bored. Which will happen eventually, but until then I revel in this slow pace, after the hectic rush of the past few months.

Yet, this slowing down has created plenty of space for strange thoughts and musings. Christmas was delightful, once it truly arrived. My family and I made sugar cookies, sang hymns by candlelight, and exchanged gifts around our tree, whose ornaments carry the history of lives. I finally manged to relax and simply enjoy the spirit of the season... Although I found myself torn once again by wishing to be exactly where I was, and with my more far-flung family at the same time.

In the lazy days since Christmas, a number of thoughts have been chasing themselves around my head. I processed with shock and a sudden, unexpected grief the news of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. I am not going to claim that she was a hero to me, or that I knew a great deal about her, besides what we all heard or read in the news. But her death made me realize with a crashing horror what a courageous leader has been lost to us, and what a life of conviction. Not only that, her death seems to encapsulate for me the intensity of the fear, instability, and violence that consumes that region of the world. It is another jolt to my expanding awareness of the turmoil that surrounds us.

I am also, as of yet, trying to ignore the fact that the year is drawing inevitably to a close. I am not ready to admit that yet, not ready to reflect on the year I have just had. Most of all, I am not ready to speculate about the year to some. It's too much at the moment, but I know I will be forced into a fresh year soon anyway.

I still can't control a bubble of emotion when I watch a movie that ends in a happily ever after, the perfect couple united at last, as you knew they had to be. I realize that I would like to be in love in theory; in that nice, inevitable way that it happens on screen. Yet, when I am confronted with reality it is so disturbingly messy that I end up recoiling in fear and confusion. Circumstances are not right, the wrong people get involved, emotions run wild. Really, being single is so much more simple. I have always known that life is not like a romantic comedy, at least once I passed the age of eleven or twelve. I know what is fiction and what is not... on a certain rational level. But there is something in my brain, or my gut that yearns to have that fiction for myself. However, I am a coward, and I will run away from the messiness of real life as long as I can. I only hope I can be forgiven for that.

I received, as a Christmas gift, and elusive copy of Atonement, by Ian McEwan. It has gripped me far more than I had anticipated, and I find myself marveling at how intensely McEwan plunges the reader into the inner lives of his characters. It so deep a plunge that I feel something has been revealed to me as another writer. Only, I am still uncertain, especially since I am only about (perhaps not quite) halfway through. I am waiting to see what happens next.

Now I am struggling with my own inertia, and sudden anti-social behavior. Right now, I would like to be a hermit. An idle hermit. True hermitage, however, isn't exactly on the list of options. And there seems to be a general disregard for people who do nothing. I don't see anything wrong with it, but...