Restlessness

It's a feeling that I never ever used to have. I was the most contented body to grace this planet during my childhood. Home contained all I needed. The corner of the green living room sofa with my latest Redwall, L'Engle, or Tolkien; the Wurlitzer piano and its cargo of sheet music; the battered boombox and three mismatched candles in my half of the bedroom I shared with Hannah; the journal I slid under my pillow each night. So long as I could escape the sound and fury of my bustling home for a few hours each day, so long as the library was a block away and I could bike to the park when the weather was fine, I was satisfied. And venues for escape abounded. There was the massive snowpile in the adjacent parking lot in the winter, the shallow crick and its clayed banks in the summer. There was the luxury of Monday night piano lessons: just me and mom, and NPR keeping us company on the way there and back. There was the secret pleasure of doing dishes on winter evenings, sleeves rolled past my elbows and the front of my shirt soaked and sudsy. In a world where I could not even claim a set of pajamas as distinctly my own because I shared all things in common with my twin, I carved my privacy from the crowding and pandemonium of a household of ten, and rarely felt smothered.

Now I possess the sort of privacy that would have shocked my childhood self: my own bedroom, my own bathroom, a closet full of my own clothes, my own car, my own office, mountain trails, soccer fields, and city haunts at my disposal. But it is never enough. I am restless now. No matter how much solitude I get, I can't find the stillness that used to live within me.

What changed? I grew up. I became complicated. Materialism sank its claws into me. The standards that I saw on TV and in the lives of those all around me became overwhelmingly important, and the important things shrank into the background, and now they are neglected and clamoring. Even in the silence that used to be so precious to me they will not let me rest.

I tell myself that moving will cure me. I fantasize about hopping into my car one morning and driving as far north as I can--to a place where I don't need to feel the embarrassment of not having achieved the proscribed measure of success or affluence in my life, or worry about disappointing anyone.

But who am I kidding? Remember, Abby? "Everything glorious is around us already." Remember? "We continue to behave more or less like the people we are, even on pilgrimage." Remember? "It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for."

Most of all, remember...

the heartshackles are not, as you think,

death, illness, pain

unrequited hope, not loneliness, but

lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety,

selfishness