Day 15: Restlessness or something like it

It almost always snows late in April in the Great Lakes State.   April 18 and it is snowing, snowing hard and sticking in certain places.  And last Sunday, it was 80 degrees.   Up and down, like a rollercoaster.   Like my emotions, like my days.

Original, I know, weather and emotions and rollercoasters.  What a surprise that I am not the fucking poet laureate.

Last Monday was really a bad day and marked a turning point with stronger medications and a new outlook.   Yet, here I am listening to the Boomtown Rats singing why "I don't like Mondays."   And I have that heaviness in my chest, restlessness, a longing to get where I am going.  Now.  Already.   But action for the sake of action will only lead me to spin my wheels or to engage in patterns that will lead to the same negative results.  Simply put, I cannot get where I am going if I don't yet know where that place is.  

It's is disheartening and frustrating and makes me want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head.   Again.  Rainer Maria Rilke explained it thusly in Letters to a young poet:

            "You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can. dear sir, to be   patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is,to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you win then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

But what to do when you are not so young anymore?  Shouldn't I least know what the questions are in this, my 40th year?   I am trying to live everything, to venture out in search of new experiences, adventures, to change my way of thinking, to accept that I can only control my own actions.  But on days like today, I feel stuck, like my wheels are spinning in the mud, like nothing will ever change, that I will remain exactly where I am.  A hamster doomed to run around the same great spinning wheel.   

Patience has never been a virtue for me.   I feel hypocritical when I (impatiently) tell my 4-year old that she has to be patient.  At least, I empathize with her, telling her that I know how difficult it is to be patient.   Perhaps, before I can learn the questions and answers, I first have to learn to be patient with what is unresolved in my heart.