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2024-01-08 (Week 2301): 2300 Weeks
It’s hard to know where to start this one, as I got the news last night that one of my parents may be on the precipice of passing away (again). It isn’t the first hospital stay (or death scare) in the last few years, so I’m mentally prepared for the worst, but I don’t want to see it happen. That said, I must endure.
With my habit of counting weeks to track how I spend my time and how my ideas develop over time, this is week 2301, day 1 of my life if the day I was born was week 1, day 1. That sentence is convoluted, but it boils down to keeping track of my weeks (and months once four weeks have passed), which helps me assess things and how my ideas have changed over time.
This week’s change feels like more of a dividing line between an era steeped in imagination and one steeped in duty. Fanciful ideas of musical success, boundless creativity, and finding the perfect game to dive into have since passed, and the duty to make my existence known (and the ideas I bring to it) for longer than the time of my passing is where I’m at now.
The health scare with one of my parents brings that to light, as I remember having a conversation about collecting stories from a grandparent. Since that grandparent has passed, those stories in their first generation are gone and only remain in the second generation. Perhaps the stories themselves are of no import, but the knowledge they could pass along from generation to generation from their experience could be.
It hearkens back to a class I took on Scandinavian folklore and a book on Finnish folklore, which tells of Elias Lönnrot collecting tales from people across parts of Finland and the Baltic countries to put together the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic. Had he not chosen to undertake that task, those stories may have been lost to time.
While I’m too late to collect stories from that grandparent (or any of them), and perhaps am too late to gather stories from my parent in dire health properly (I’ve heard more than a few), I’m not too late to tell my own. I’ve told a few of my tales on this website and other places, but they’re all fragments, and I want to put something together that’s more cohesive.
It would be easier to do so with words than with music, which was my preferred method for many years. Over time, I’ve lost my music, and my words have become more concrete. I have at least one longer tale to tell and one shorter one. The ideas are forming, and I will do my best to express them.
In hindsight, all of my previous music and stories found inspiration in the works of others, and I was doing my best to reflect on how they impressed upon me. These two tales are either from personal experience or a culmination of ideas I’ve collected, pondered, and researched over time, but specifically over the past six months. More reading is required, and more sifting of notes is needed as well to create more concrete chapters, but I will do what I have to do to get there, and I will know when the time is right to start writing.
In the meantime, I need to keep writing fragments. I also need to take a softer approach to tell tales, as my current method resembles a sledgehammer crashing into a concrete slab. Hard, terse, and blunt. Sometimes long-winded as well. That is my style, though, and I need to embrace who I am without forcing myself to be something else. I’ve done that a lot over the years because I wasn’t confident in myself.
That said, being at the 2300-week mark, I’m looking forward to what the next 100 weeks will bring and what I can accomplish. I keep thinking it will be getting rid of the unnecessary and refining what was into what is, but I know that’s a tack I’ve taken for the last 370 weeks or so. It may just be an extended refinement process I must endure. It should make more sense over time, or maybe it won’t. We shall see.
Until next week!
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