{"id":20623,"date":"2017-12-31T12:39:04","date_gmt":"2017-12-31T17:39:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.runkevinrun.com\/?p=20623"},"modified":"2017-12-31T12:39:04","modified_gmt":"2017-12-31T17:39:04","slug":"looking-backwards-and-somewhat-forwards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/?p=20623","title":{"rendered":"Looking Backwards and somewhat Forwards"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a year. I try and tell myself that it&#8217;s just another day and not to let the melancholy musings of time and space weigh down on the soul. It&#8217;s an arbitrary construct &#8212; the calendar year just as easily could run from the Julian July to July as it does January to December. But there&#8217;s no denying the earth has gone round the sun a full cycle no matter where we put the start line. It&#8217;s the distance and the time and that&#8217;s the course we run.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m heavier than I&#8217;ve been in years. There&#8217;s grey hairs poking out at my temples. The lines are longer on the face but fortunately sometimes from laughs.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m feeling low. I have been feeling low.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m feeling slow. I have been feeling slow.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m feeling old. I have been feeling old.<\/p>\n<p>In 2017, I had some great adventures with Mom and my brother. I got to hang out with friends near and far. I had it far easier than most &#8212; I should be thankful and happy and I try and be&#8230; I try and just be&#8230; but this time of year, even in the best of years, leaves me feeling down. And this year, despite a lot of good things for me, felt like a rough year for the world as a whole.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m having a hard time motivating myself to get up and go. There are a lot of things that I tried to do this year that never got off the ground&#8230; or things that I tried to change that had me raging against the sky, my voice unheard (I&#8217;m looking at you neighbors who park overnight on the street in contravention of the HOA covenants and create an obstacle course a videogame maker would deem masocore &#8212; a combination of complex mechanics and intense difficulty that results in a feeling of impossibility and requires such lengthy trial and error as to frustrate players into giving up).<\/p>\n<p>The glass half full (or more) types would say that the new year is a clean slate, a means to start again, to strive for change and betterment. That new year&#8217;s resolutions are jumper cables to the soul.<\/p>\n<p>Of late I&#8217;ve been describing myself as a <em>mal vivant<\/em>, a glass if 3\/4 empty guy.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m just trying to make it to the next dawn.<\/p>\n<p>***<\/p>\n<p>My goal for 2018 is to view it as one giant game of Jenga.<\/p>\n<p>Tomorrow, on the 1st of January, the year is one solid block and I&#8217;ll begin pushing and pulling, nudging and prodding, and extracting a piece at a time to stack on top of the year in the hopes of building something a bit higher.<\/p>\n<p>It may not be stable, it may all come collapsing down, but perhaps there will be new heights, new configurations, new *somethings* to create, to behold, to experience before then.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Jenga-Collapse.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-20627 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Jenga-Collapse-300x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Jenga-Collapse-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Jenga-Collapse-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Jenga-Collapse-768x768.jpg 768w, https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Jenga-Collapse-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Jenga-Collapse-660x660.jpg 660w, https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Jenga-Collapse-450x450.jpg 450w, https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Jenga-Collapse.jpg 1500w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a year. I try and tell myself that it&#8217;s just another day and not to let the melancholy musings of time and space weigh down on the soul. It&#8217;s an arbitrary construct &#8212; the calendar year just as easily could run from the Julian July to July as it does January to December. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}