Mamamontezz's Mental Rumpus Room

Balancing on the Edge.

Have you ever walked on an edge or along a beam, one foot in front of the other, balanced yet not completely? You continue on, comforted when the edge is clean and smooth and straight, concerned when it seems crumbly or unsettled.

When you reach a solid spot, the urge is to hurry along, to complete quickly what is easy. But when you reach a span which is compromised, where the footing is unsure, the temptation is to slowly move an inch at a time, fearful of the fall, stiff and stilted with overbalance and over compensation.

In reflection it would seem clearly better, as a man or a woman, a wife, a friend or a lover, to reverse that pattern. Linger in the smooth areas to enjoy them, and not dawdle in the rocky and difficult ones. Often in midst of difficulty is the most beauty, the greatest reward, even the greater chance of finding a serenity never before found and never experienced before.

If you find yourself forced to leave that path, you find warm grass and cool water just inches from your difficulty. As is also the case, often the smoothest stretches are through the most dangerous environs, craggy and rough, with tempests which pound below and seek to pull you deep and far from your path. The path is constant, and the way may seem easy and well traveled, but in fact it is a deception.

Look at your path and how you are walking it. Then take a moment to stand at the edge and open your eyes to what surrounds you. If you fell, or if you decided to step down, where would you find yourself? Even what looks like a dark abyss can be a beautiful moon shadow concealing warm arms and a good heart. And what seems a safe harbor can be riddled with tricky tides that push and pull you mercilessly.

And so now I stand here, with the crosswinds picking up and the gusts causing the pebbled and sandy path to shift, one foot on that fragile edge with a great unknown beyond it. Decisions must be made involving choices with enormous potental for both good and bad, impacting far more people than just this one tormented soul.

To go or to stay? To remain in a personal stasis or to push myself toward greater potential personal expansion? To stay safely in routine or break loose into uncharted seas? To continue to accept the pain and and frustration with which I am intimately familiar, or to gamble with what lies hidden in the shadows, be it happiness or a different kind of pain? Regardless of the decision or the action taken, whichever direction I go the decision cannot be for me alone.

I am not simply one person: mother, wife, employee, co-worker, friend, lover, counselor, rock, feathers, rage, and warm softness, all of these and more. Each of them is either an extension or an opening around the well worn edge of a single puzzle piece depicting on its surface a fair-faced and red haired woman with a fatigued soul and a need for direction. And on each jig-sawed extention, within each opening about the circumfrance of that piece are others, many others, inter-connected and inter-dependent, and all affected by what happens to that single piece, as they would be with any piece in the complex web of this life.

This decision is within reach of my fingertips, just over the edge of the path.

Posted by Mamamontezz at March 23, 2005 04:02 PM