Playing Scrabble with God

This morning I played Scrabble with God.

Yeah, I know, you’ll probably find me either sacrilegious or crazy… but I don’t have another explanation. I had just sat myself down by the stove, where I turned on the fan so that I could enjoy my first cigarette and cup of coffee of the day – jump-starting my daily addictions – and turned on my iPod touch for a game of Scrabble. Everyone else was asleep. It was 6:30 a.m., and as I’d had a long day yesterday, I’d gone to bed before 10 p.m. (they were in bed before me.) Eight hours of sleep is plenty, my body said – so up I was.

As I sat down to play, I told myself simultaneously that I should really go and write in my blog instead… and that if I got involved in a Scrabble game, it would just lead to another and then another, and I’d be sitting there for hours, wasting time.

The letters hopped magically onto my screen (gotta love technology) and the first word that jumped out at me was “devil”. Nope, I said, I don’t care how many points it has, I’m not using that one this morning. So I touched the “shuffle” icon, and the letters rearranged themselves to read, in part, “God”. Ah, I thought, a message. (I’m funny that way.) Having said “no” to the devil, God was a logical alternative. But as this was a Scrabble game, I didn’t want to actually plunk God down on the board; not enough points, especially for a first play. So I “shuffled” again.

“Go live” was the third and final message of the morning.

Message received. I finished my cigarette, grabbed my cup of coffee in my semi-free right hand, and here I am.

I’ve had a hard time finding inspiration for this blog in past weeks. While I was gallivanting around Southeast Asia in a wheelchair, or adjusting to life in a Cambodian commune, I found it much easier to find things I thought worth sharing with family and friends. Now that I’m back in a world that means “home” to me, it’s hard to find things to tell you that don’t seem pedestrian… or whiny.

In the “whine” department, I’m feeling quite a bit of trepidation about my return to Paris. I’m looking forward to seeing friends again, to getting back to my choirs. I have ideas for everything, and the motivation to carry them out.

But frequently, when I think about the next few months, it feels like I’m starting all over again, going back to where I was 27 years ago – living in a tiny studio, not enough work to live in the fashion to which I had become accustomed in Paris… and this time, several large question marks hovering above my health issues. I often feel that all of the doors and windows that have closed in recent months and years have left me standing alone on a deserted road somewhere, gazing out into a foggy someplace where I have no choice but to go, leaving behind me the safe and familiar thing that used to be my life but which simply doesn’t exist any more.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time smoking, drinking coffee and playing Scrabble in the past couple of weeks. Run away, run away.

When I’m feeling more lucid, however, I remind myself that I’m not starting all over again at all – my life and happenings in Paris are far richer than I tend to credit them with being. And as for leaving something behind me – I’m being given a chance to clean up the mess I’d made of my life (and head) over the past few years. It’s a durned good thing to be able to leave that behind, and to finally start making some choices that will lead to happiness.

(A friend asked me a few days ago what the heck “being happy” really meant… Happiness, for her, can’t be defined as being a life “goal”; finishing a thesis is a goal, paying off one’s house is a goal, starting a new business is a goal. I respectfully insist on having “being happy” as my central goal for the rest of my life. What does “being happy” mean in my reality? I’m not always sure, but more and more I’m realizing that it has something to do with waking up in the morning with a smile instead of with a groan.)

I’m trying to have faith. And in every life, in every world, even one plunged in a sort of transitional fog, there are tiny pearls of light; I shall share a few of them with you in the next post.

Meanwhile, thanks to several of you who have inquired as to whether the blog – and indeed I – continue to exist! Yes, we are here, kind of floating along.