Life.  In motion.

I took this the other day (Tuesday?  Wednesday?  Last week sometime.) on accident, on my way out the door.  I was checking the backside of the phone for lens grime before shoving it in my bag, and managed to click the dealie while walking out of the bathroom.

I kept it, though, because it looks like motion.  Like there’s a story waiting to be told.  Like I’m in action.  (Which, of course, I was.)

Like I told some friends the other day, sometimes it feels like I’m made of stories.  Some haven’t been written yet, some have started and faded to inconclusion, and some are long since complete.

I’m hoping for a happily ever after instead of a stark the end.

* * * *

There are people who live in my head.

Some would say this is a sign of Impending Crazy(tm), which it probably is.  (Don’t most writers end up going nuts and walking into the sea with rocks in every pocket?)  Entire towns of people, each with a Story, each with a past and a future and a little normal life, all going about the day-to-days of living until one of them has a story to be told.

Outside of my head, I’ve lived a lot of life.  Like, all caps LOT OF LIFE, even.  More life than a lot of people ever venture out into.

It’s that living that’s always kept me from writing fiction, but kept me moving forward.  Trying to experience just a little more, understand a little more, figure out what makes people tick so I can know enough to write something worth reading, or, to bastardize Wilde, have a life worth writing about.

For the past three days, when it’s quiet and my arms are moving and my back’s aching and I’m schlepping giant thirty-pound pans of brightly-dyed yarn from one table to another, my mind’s been telling me a story.  It’s not my story.  But one of those people, born in my head, won’t be quiet.

I keep living tiny little fragments of someone else’s story.

(And if that came out of the mouth of anyone other than a writer, I’d totally call the guys in white.  Other writers’ll get it, though.)

What’s bothering me about it is that I’m not getting the whole story.  I’m not getting the why or the how, just the big The End, and I’m empathizing too much.  I twist up skeins in my life and feel this other, imaginary woman’s ending.

One day, it’ll all make sense.

*  *  *

I feel like, at some point not long ago, I was standing at the end of a very long hallway.  At the end was an alternate ending, cellphone in one hand, his head in the other.  And despite my knocking knees and a heart that was threatening to beat its way out of my chest with the nerves, I looked back over my shoulder at the life I’d built for myself and weighed it against the very narrow prospect of building something entirely new…and took a step forward down the interminable hallway toward what Could Be, versus what Was.

I knew, as I took the steps and waited for him to look up at me, to see I was coming, how it would end.  I knew even then that it wouldn’t be pretty.  At least, not for a while.

You take the hand of Fate, and sometimes, he makes you stand in the fire until all the other, old chains burn away.

And in the end, you have your own story.  Fate has other places to be.  He only promises you your own story; everything else is up to you.

Is five minutes worth a lifetime, even if they’re a really, really good five minutes?

Or is it better not to know what you don’t have?

The unexamined life may be worth nothing, but I’m thinking now that the knowledge of what I don’t know can make a crack in me that’s so wide it might never seal back shut.  I’m bigger now; I don’t fit back in the skin I had before, in the life I had before.

My knees are just too wobbly and new.

And Fate, having finished his coffee and having pushed me into this new place with the Vision Of What Could Be, has moved on.

I’m not sure why I didn’t turn and run.

*  *  *

(And no, I haven’t been drinking.)

*  *  *

Less figuratively, I’m six designs in on The Project That Must Not Be Named.  Both my pinkies are numb from all the knitting, but if this Project comes together the way I think it’s going to, it’s going to rock.

In addition, the new solar ovens I built last week are working like a freakin’ charm on the Intention Yarns.  All of a sudden, I went from being capped at about a 200-skein-a-day capacity to being able to easily do five times that by myself.  When there are minions helpers, and when I get some more counterspace, so to speak, we could probably double even that.

And it’s green.  Like, way green.  Like, uses no external power for anything during the whole process, green.

I may be all smooshy and questioning a bunch of things, but at least I’m doing my part to help the stewardship of the planet.

I’m kinda excited, can you tell?

*  *  *

The other day, at the Big Omaha conference here in, well, Omaha…Jason Fried was one of the guest speakers.  (Jason Fried, by the way, is the 37Signals guy — the people behind Basecamp and such, for those who don’t know.)  He said something that made my eyeballs quiver.

Inspiration, he said, has a shelf life.  When you get an idea, act on it, and act on it now, before it’s past its expiration date.

(Paraphrased.  But you get the point.)

I have four billion ideas every day.  I’m exaggerating.  But ask poor Adminnie — I have a *lot* of ideas.  All the time.  In the shower, on the bike, petting the dog, squirting dye on white yarn…doesn’t matter.  They just happen.

It’s frustrating, then, to be one person, with one set of 24 hours in a day, and only two hands.

People constantly tell me that they don’t know how I do so much.  And the fact is, I don’t do any more than anybody else in this world does.  I just tend to act before the expiration date of the original inspiration,  get other people involved, and hand it all off so I can act on the next one.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere for me.  I’m just not sure yet what it is.

Maybe that’s a story I’m still writing.