11 July 2000

This month's On Display topic is restlessness, and the Word of the Day is scrutinize - to examine closely and minutely.

It's not an easy topic for me, because I'm not a very restless person. Pretty much the opposite, in fact. When I was in high school and all my friends were trying to see how far away they could go for college, I wanted to go to William and Mary, half an hour from my parents' house. When I finished graduate school, I couldn't come home fast enough. When I'm looking for jobs now, I limit myself to this area. I say I want to travel, but mostly I just want to look at things in other places and then come home at night to sleep. Matt bounces his leg constantly with a kind of restless nervous energy. I don't get it.

I'm just not a restless person. I'm a staid homebody with little or no ambition.

Every now and then I'll feel restless. I've been more restless than usual in the past couple of months. Usually, if I just ignore it, it fades away. But this time, each new restlessness has been feeding another. Job dissatisfaction. The Hall plot a month or so ago and its attendant need to write. Philosophical and spiritual cravings. A desire for more variety in my social life.

And all of those things are linked, I think, one way or another. But they're not fading. Oh, with the Hall plot resolved, I'm not struggling with character feedback any more. But I've still got this desire to write, only I can't seem to stick to or finish anything but scenes and vignettes. I'm working on the philosophical and spiritual cravings, but I have to go slow, because my mind has been trained to reject instantly and violently any hint of being told what it can and should and can't and shouldn't do by any external source. My expressed desire for a more varied social life only churned up a lot of worry and turmoil among my friends, and now I'm not sure where we all stand. My job hasn't gotten any more satisfying, but I've so far failed to think of another track that I think would suit me better.

I wish I knew what caused the feeling. I'd choke it until it died, or else drag it out into the light so I could satisfy it. As it stands, it's like putting my hands into a river and trying to pull up handfuls of mud from the bottom - I can touch it, but it slips from my fingers before I can pull it out.

It feels like there's a step that has to be taken, only I'm not sure how to take it. I wonder if this is what causes seemingly content and happy people to commit suicide - are they overwhelmed with this peculiar restlessness until they finally decide that the only way to still it, the only possible step to take, is to move on to the next life, the next world? I can't imagine that's right. Life is a gift, and to reject it without having plumbed it to its depths is wrong on a scale I can't even comprehend.

But what, then? Maybe it's a warning from my subconscious not to get stuck in a rut. This is the longest I've ever gone without some sort of major change. (No, being laid off and changing jobs doesn't count. I'm doing the exact same job for Logicon that I was doing for 3GI, right down to the individual projects. It's almost eerie how similar they are.) But what am I supposed to change? No matter how closely I scrutinize my life, I can't seem to see the piece that's going bad, the part that needs to be removed or replaced or repaired because it's contaminating the rest.

Mental restlessness. This, too, shall pass.