Why standing still is scary

There is this weird state that I am in, right now.

I think, I have overdone, overstayed my welcome rest, respite, from writing, and everything else. I had managed to finish the first draft, a couple of weeks back. I wrote about it. It was after all an event quite unlike another. It was a first. And no matter how bad it is, the first one is the first one. So, I had written about it the next day, and then, in my mind, I had decided that I will take a week long break. Clear my head, so to say. The first week slipped away, like sand through the fingers. The week after that though, was not so fluid. It dragged on.

And now, that I wish to describe it, the only word that comes to my head is ‘uneasy’. That’s how I was feeling. Uneasy.

I felt out of my element. I felt trapped somehow. I hated where I was, but I did not wish to leave where I was either. I did not want to work. That extended the week, to proportions larger, than standard. There was no end in sight.

I was thinking a lot during the week.

Clarity, as is the case usually, happens later.

I was struggling with the reason for my struggles. I was struggling to come up with an explanation for the blandness of the times, the uneasiness I was feeling. The feeling that I was somehow missing on things, because I was not working on a short story, or thinking of things for the next one, made me uneasy. That was my finding. I, like, many in my age, was, and still am, afraid of standing still.

Standing still.

Two syllables that haunt my generation. The feeling that we have somehow been cheated. That we have so less time, to achieve so much. That we can not walk, just walk, and not be in transition. From point ‘A’ to ‘B’.

I don’t know how to end this. I’ve just finished talking about the core of what I wanted to say. This is, of course, not something that is new. Something that is a revelation. It’s not. It is part of the ongoing struggle. Something that I have to keep reminding myself of, whenever I face it.

I don’t expect that this is the last time, I will be seeing this behaviour in me. But I do expect, hope, to have a better response to it.

That reminds me, I have to speak to you, about death. It has returned, the fear!