Waking Up

Part of you wants to be clear.
Sharp. Your edges clear.
Decisions always easy.
Never having to think things through.
Sure, every moment, of your emotions,
Or even, emotions be damned,
Sure, even, of yourself,
your value, your direction,
your whys.

You admire those,
even when they are most certainly wrong,
with that surity,
no need to weigh circumstances and context,
no need to balance heart and head.
Nothing to sort out.

But you are not made that way.
There is too much context and too much not known.
and your head insists on seeing it all
and your heart, so recently healed,
insists on feeling it all.
A slow path, with explanations so long
you even bore yourself.

Still, you get there. You decide. You act.
You get up in the morning
even when there are few arguments to do so,
even when you lose the arguments, you get up.
You love. Your muddle through.
Things get done and in time clarity re-emerges
and you feel, at last, yourself again.

About this poem.

I wonder at those who are so sure they are so right all the time. Where does that come from? Is it real. Or is it laziness, an unwillingness to wrestle.

Waking up is hard. Readers know that. Emotions process as slow as molasses. The demons of depression seem to wake up faster than I do. No matter. I get there. Persistence wins the race.

This poem? An attempt to mix the two, An experiment. Not unlike the painting at the header, which I thought had failed when I first painted it. And yet, the longer I look at it in my studio, the more I like it. There’s a lesson in that.

Tom