Another dark night of the soul.
I'm feeling invisible. I feel lost, can not sleep.
What is a good life? What is enough?
So much done. Yet so much not reached.
Elsa's Blog Journals.

Another Midnight of the Soul?

May 1, 2011

It's the middle of the night. I've been awake a couple of hours. I can think of things to do, things to fill the time, things better done. I've yawned many times. For now, I've given up trying to fall asleep.

Another midnight of the soul. Not quite midnight, maybe. But one of the darker nights.

So much done, over the past few months. So many hopes. An e-book of love poems launched.

People met.

But floundering. No one with me. Easiest sometimes to do tasks, get the next task done.

Will things ever come together, in a way that feels truly right?

It's not that I want to go back to teaching - it felt way too small, at the end. But there was a structure for getting things done.

The figures for my site keep going up. Over 60,000 page views for the months of April - up from under 50,000 just a couple of months ago. But I have the feeling of accomplishing nothing - no community, no sense of building something.

I've just read 3 books that impressed me. The Tipping Point. Blink. Outliers. All by Malcolm Gladwell. It feels like he's truly building, creating something.

It's always darkest before dawn, the words go through my head.

But it doesn't really feel dark. I feel lost. Lost. As if in the middle of a sea, wide, endless in every direction - not dangerous, not cold - just nothingness in every direction.

What do do next?

Usually, at night, if things feel too much for me, I say - that's it, enough for the day. Time to sleep. And then in the morning, things no longer feel too much.

Do they feel too much, right now?

Not really. I just don't know what to do next, where to head.

A few days ago, a task: TED videos. TED, big idea site, for the first time ever was inviting submissions from the public. Length: 1 minute max. I learned of the invitation just a few days before the deadline.

Deadline: April 25. On the 24th, in the early evening. I videotaped 5 little videos, started editing. On the 25th, I did the final cutting, and sent the submissions.

A task. A task completed. I will know by May 9th - one week and a day - if any of my little videos made it past the first hurdle.

But there are a million other things I could be doing.

Such a sense of lostness in the vastness of the ocean.

Sometimes we need to arrive, need others with us. Such a sense of aloneness.

Maybe the feeling is so strong, now, as I'm not at home. I'm in Prague - half business and half pleasure.

But I have felt lost too, at home.

In the end, something always pulls me, calls me. A few things are tugging at me, even now, things left undone in the muddle of rushing forward, doing things it felt urgent to do.

So I know I will be doing things again.

I would love not to feel so alone, but deeply connected to some special other, and to others - in the way I feel deeply connected to my animals. Or anyway, I feel more important to them, and there feels much more of a flow of caring with them, than with people.

Elsa

PS. I know one thing I will be doing, once I am home. A TO DO List - something I've always found very helpful. I do more - and as I cross off things, one after the other, I have more of a sense of having accomplished things.

Click here to go to a loneliness blog
about another of those dark nights.

Click here to go to
Where Is My Match,
a poem about what's
at the heart
of the loneliness.

Another dark night of the soul.
I'm feeling invisible.
I feel lost, can not sleep.
What is a good life? What is enough?
So much done.
Yet so much not reached.
Elsa's Blog Journals.