Navel-Gazing.

                                         

My parents were of the school - rather as if they were straight out of a Wodehouse chapter - which quite naturally used the phrase "Navel gazing". It was an eclectic grouping of everything from deep psychiatric therapy to "finding oneself" to "meditation"...well any form of prolonged thinking about oneself. Not that my parents were averse to spiritual or metaphysical contemplation. Just not about oneself.

As the nuns confirmed that paying too much attention to oneself was the very epitome of vanity, I think I've always thought of it at least as self-indulgent.  As if putting too much thought into why I'd been so upset about something someone had said to me, would be like wolfing down an entire, £1.00 slab of chocolate.

Oh, I've done it of course. Just as I've wolfed down an entire, £1.00 slab of chocolate from time to time. And I've felt the same kind of sinking, sick guilt after having done both.

The thing I find most unexpected right now is that I should, at this stage in my life, have only just discovered this aversion towards spending too much time thinking about my own self because I was, in fact, allowing myself to face up to my own navel. So to speak.

I force myself to read back on the last paragraph and conclude that it's nothing but word-sauce. Which is embarrassing.  I'd thought myself to have cunningly wrought a skillfull turn of phrase - only to discover that, to anyone who didn't know I was ill atm, it looks as though I have at least suffered a stiff blow to the head.

It's rather frightening to sit down at the keyboard, open a blank page in Office, batter away like mad to capture all the clear, logical, humorous and interesting things which have occurred to one while trying out a spot of the old navel-gazing - to find that the products of so-doing appears to be as vapid, empty and hideously and unecessarily convulated as a paragraph from Bertie to Jeeves on the same subject would be.

Even as I write I find the sentence wandering away...heading off down some distant pathway I haven't even glimpsed yet. And if one can't control mere sentences, it's rather daunting to contemplate where actual paragraphs would lead.

Yet I did it.  I wrote something down. Not exactly for public consumption, as only about two people in the entire world even know this blogsite exists. (To be fair, I myself had forgotten about it till last week when it suddenly appeared, rather dusty and dischevelled, from the depths of a forgotten file.)

However I have manoeuvred a bunch of words out of the somewhat crowded muddle of my head, committed them to posterity, and pressed the Publish key.  There exists, therefore, a rather healthy chance that, somewhere between the time I press that key, and the day all computers die; eyes other than mine could light upon this.

So I feel somewhat triumphant.  Two weeks out from coming to terms with the fact that I have actually resigned from writing for anyone else except myself, I have actually done so.

And what a right royal cock-up that's turned out to be.

However I'll keep an eye on my navel and whether it produces any meaningful insights or just blue fluff, I shall have another go at writing about it.

(Hopefully, before then, I'll figure out why, after a lifetime spent sniggering at people who don't know their "there's" from their "theirs", or "to" from "too", this particular skill appears no longer possible to transfer from my brain to my fingers. Which continue to leap about with a life of their own, spitefully churning out possessive "s" for "its", and strewing grocers apostrophes about like confetti.)