You can take me where you will, up the creek and through the mill

Sometimes in life, we rely too heavily on directions and forget to examine the map. It's not until we find the road ahead to be blocked that we realise that not only are there two or three alternative ways of getting to where we were going, but there are all manner of other destinations which we might consider heading towards instead. However, in this modern age of Sat-Nav (and indeed before then for other reasons that this metaphor flounders over), it can be very easy to forget that there is a map in the glove-compartment at all. So you sit at the roadblock and weep.

Every time things change with my health, I tend to panic for a while before I remember to do what I have always managed to do previously. More than panic; it does cross my mind that this is it, that this is one obstacle too many and I've gone as far as I'm ever going to go. This seems incredibly melodramatic in hindsight, but I never learn.

Because whilst there usually are several unexpected paths to take, not everything is possible. I can't learn Judo or the Tango (both of which have always had some appeal, oddly enough) because all the conceivable routes to those things are blocked. If I am able to work for a living, then I am yet to discover that road; it's either very well-hidden or may involve taking a short-cut across a field (hmm, I hadn't really thought that one through).

So it's not totally irrational that I despair; if I cannot see it, it might not be there. But past experience suggests it probably is. I just need to study the map again.

Writing is a deeply unsatisfactory exercise just now. The windows in which I can work are extremely narrow and infrequent. Some days there are none and some days there are very few; things are getting better but there are still days of thick white fog. And how much you can write or edit in five or ten minutes doesn't really seem worth it. You lose your mental thread between times so it can take several of those minutes to find your bearings. And then it occurs to you that those four or five sentences weren't particularly good so in frustration, you delete a day's work. That's if they're actually there at all; if you timed-out at the end of the last session, you might well have closed up without saving. Which is a bit of a bummer.

But it is a very simple choice; either I wait until my health is good enough such that I can churn words out for much longer periods at a stretch or I find a way to make it work now. That way it happens slowly, but it happens. After all, at some much earlier juncture I had to accept that I couldn't write all day without very many significant breaks. And everyone has to accept that whatever they're doing, however much they are into it, sooner or later you need to eat, sleep and have a bath.

A particular bugger if bathing consumes almost all the energy of one day. But then you can always wash less often.

So I guess it'll have to be one sentence at a time, sweet Jesus.