‘Life is in the minding.‘

Saturdays and Sundays in this blog don’t have a theme.  They are wide open.

Any subject.

Any subject at all.

Consequently, with the universe from which to choose, it is sometimes hard to think of anything to write.

Why is that?

I’m not sure, but today I think it has something to do with some lines that have always resonated with me from Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love.

Will you be a poet, or a scholar?
                I don’t mind.
Oh, it helps to mind.  Life is in the minding.

There is something about choices.  It’s great to have them, but they can be overwhelming.

Have you ever walked into a library or a bookstore and left without any books?  Or a video rental store and gone home to watch reruns of Law & Order?

Maybe it’s just me, but I enter such establishments with anticipation.  I’m going to find something great to read or watch.  And I wander up and down the aisles looking at everything that is on offer on the shelves.  Picking up this movie, flipping through those pages.  Do I feel like watching a comedy or a thriller?  Do I want to read Jane Austen or Maya Angelou?  And as I ponder these choices I begin to hyperventilate.

Figuratively speaking.

I mean, I don’t have to breathe into a paper bag or anything.

I just find myself thinking sometimes, when I have a lot of choices, “oh, just forget it!” and walking out without anything.

It’s not an option when you have a blog post to write.

Or…I guess it could be.  We could declare Silent Saturdays.  Seems like a cop-out, though, doesn’t it?

I was reading something somewhere (I have got to start taking writing things down!  The old memory is not what it used to be) about practicing making choices.  The idea was that you should never say “I don’t care” or “It doesn’t matter.”  Even if you really don’t care which restaurant you’re going patronize tonight, you should make a choice.  Voice a preference.

Art is all about making choices.  We better get used to it.