After many months of unprecedented and unexpected quiet, I seem to be back on speaking terms with myself. For as long as I can remember I’ve had a silent voice in my head that likes to babble non-stop, composing mental soliloquies while I listen with fascination and frustration, trying to either keep up or shut it up. But last Fall the voice suddenly said, okay, now you need to do some thinking of your own for a while, and then it went stubbornly quiet.

 I was hooped for weeks trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

My old blog that I had since 2002 stopped being fun a while back, for several reasons, but suddenly losing my ghostwriter sealed the deal. I’m not a stupid woman or without some ability of my own, but trying to blog without that creative voice was a bit like opening the fridge door and finding nothing but mouldy cheese and Tupperware of questionable age and content. Faced with the work of obtaining food, suddenly you’re not nearly as hungry as you thought you were a second ago.

Eventually hunger overrides apathy and sloth, and you know you gotta eat. But what? And where? Aw, dammit… more work!

I reluctantly did the thinking that my head — or my ‘higher and more infuriating self’ — forced me to do and got past that evolutionary thump, and I feel like blogging again, but so much has happened in the meantime. I’ve been procrastinating horribly because of that. What should I call a new blog? What kind of blog should it be? What use would it serve? But more than anything… where the hell do I even start?!?

Should I try to catch up from where my writing left off in the old blog? Hmm, I’m not sure that I want to carry any of that forward. But some pretty cool and interesting stuff happened along the way – should I mention it at all? And will who I am now make any sense to anyone if I don’t include, or awkwardly repeat, old stuff about where I’ve already been?

All of this was brewing in my head tonight, for the umpteenth time. But this time when I tripped on this question, I didn’t just say “aw, fuck it” and procrastinate some more – instead I mentally flashed to a week ago, sitting at an outdoor cafe with one of my best friends, who happens to travel all over the country as a regular part of his job.

He got a phone call and I tried to tune it out and give him as much privacy as I could, but there’s only so long you can pretend to read a menu. The voice on the other end of the phone asked my friend how his flight had been and, presumably, something along the lines of “where are you?”. I couldn’t help but listen and be touched by the answer.

We just are where we are. That way we’re not going somewhere, we’re just being where we are at the moment. We’re never *waiting* for something … we’re always just being where we are.

Right. Of course. Duh. I knew that. I, er, just temporarily forgot.

Thanks, pal.

So here I am.

Today.

Now.

I’ll go on from here.