trying to find my words

I’ve just come in from a walk in the rain. I was coming home from my night job and spent some time walking the extra block or two to the next transit stop, just so I’d have a little farther to walk. I walk, and I hear a set of songs on the iPod that suit my mood: Pearl Jam with Wishlist, Johnny Cash & Tom Petty on I Won’t Back Down, and Johnny Cash again with Guess Things Happen That Way. And it suits my mood, because I can’t find my words.

It’s like that little moment where you know the name of someone or the word you need, and it’s on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t find the word. And it nags at you all day, and usually comes to you at 3 in the morning. With me, I have lots of those moments. It’s almost like one long continuous moment. And I don’t necessarily ever find the words and I don’t have that “Eureka!” moment at 3 a.m.

Walking in the rain, I get just a little closer to finding the words. I can’t find that moment when I figure out where my life needs to go. That moment when I can articulate what it is I am supposed to do, not necessarily causing all the assorted pieces of my life to fall into place, but at least something to make me go “Well that’s the direction I want to go in.” The music helps – sometimes to distract me from the fact I can’t find the words, sometimes to cause something in my mind to stir, to nudge me a little bit closer to… something. There’s something I’m supposed to do, someplace I am supposed to be. It’s some indescribable something that won’t cause me to weigh options and anxiously ask “should I or shouldn’t I?”, but a something that will cause me to go “Aha, but of course, that’s what I want to do”, that will drive me and be my passion.

I think that’s one of the reasons I carry a notebook and pen: when that idea presents itself, I want to write that bastard down before I lose it. I’m just trying to figure out the idea. And one of these days soon, I will.

But for now it’s on the tip of my tongue and I can’t find those damned words.