I seem to have far too much to say in this medium, and just at the point where I have too much to say, I have almost no time in which to say it.

Things have been super busy.  I've just billed the biggest month in four years of consulting history, and have been wrestling with the schedule that comes with such a high revenue.  With semi-daily calls to streamsandpools and what seems like it's going to be a weekly doctor visit, my nights end at dinner and often resume for a few hours to make up the lost time.  Toss in social events and housework needs, and it means most of my waking hours are spent either working or waiting to return to work.  It's a grueling schedule that will continue throughout most of May.  But surprisingly, I seem to be handling it fairly well.

I think I can chalk some of this up to my new daily routine, which involves a half hour walk each morning fresh from bed, followed by a shower and then a big steaming bowl of oatmeal with two eggs.  It's been transformative to start my day with exercise and a big breakfast, to be able to connect immediately with my physical self and give my brain space to process the neighborhood, the birds, the sky, the weather instead of the spin or the thousand things going on in the Big Life at present.  I find that, generally, it's caused a lift in my mood, or at least a decrease in the tendency for a downturn.

Waking up each morning and immediately looking forward to my walk and my oatmeal is a new experience for me as well.  It makes me feel more like the person I'm working on becoming.  Not that there is anything wrong with the person I have been, but he has some destructive patterns that need to go away in order for him to be the old man I'd like to be eventually.

I think this doctor journey, though it's far from over and may even just be starting, is something that is giving me the final last jolt into a healthy practice and a way of looking at myself, my life, and my body that I've felt was needed for years.  I consider the time after my divorce to be a time of reclaiming and rediscovery, and I'm feeling like that particular period is coming to a close.

In the meantime, I've been doing an experiment which involves my child, mainly revitalizing and remapping the places of joy in my life, an exercise that I will be trying to eventually feed into my writing and approach to writing.  I decided earlier this year that I was going to take myself to a movie a week, and see all the big action blockbusters of the year, all the comic films, all the movies that my child would have peed himself over when I was a child.

The experiment, though, hinges on losing the critic mind, which I'm finding to be both very fulfilling and very difficult.  My child never wanted to intellectually dissect a movie when it was over, discussing plot holes and weak parts of the direction and the script.  He never wanted to compare it to other movies, to the book, to other parts of the series or to analyze the actors and their commitment to the part or the part's fit for them.  And yet that's always what my adult does, sometimes even while the credits roll.

The idea is to go to these films without the critic, to find something in them that wows, to connect with the richness of the fantasy, to suspend disbelief.  The idea is to see good where there is good and to accept the good without pointing a finger to what could be better, yearning for more good, or worse yet perfection, to fill up the well of the child and let him swim in the glee of these otherworlds.  And it's been working.  Forbidden Kingdom gave me Jackie Chan as the Drunken Master again, and Jet Li  as the Monkey King.  Iron Man gave me one of my favorite childhood comic book heros brought to life.  And each movie introduced me to worlds that my imagination longed to linger in.

In a sense, I'm trying to get to a place where I'm better able to come to a thing in whichever mind I choose to come to it with, to be able to joyfully be the critic without feeling like I'm naysaying and to be able to joyfully be the childmind without feeling like I'm just swallowing pablum.

The implications for silencing my critic mind when it comes to writing are immense.  I plan to add my reading and writing practice back in to the mix once the work load softens.

And now it is late and I must to bed.  There is more to tell, about my upcoming trip to England, about my dread about Mondays, about my mother and my family, but these will have to wait.  I'll be back whenever I can, and until then, thank you.