I’ve been thinking about repetition. When I feel particularly beaten up and a bit sorry for my sorry self, it is often the repetition of being depressed that seems so unforgiving. And unbearable. Oh God, I bellow or whisper, please let me wake up somewhere else. Somewhere new.

I can see though, when I’m in a kinder mood, that life repeats us all, depressed or not. We all wake up at the beginning of each new day and find ourselves there. Over and over again we do stuff. And I am finding a latent comfort in that. Just as much as I rail against it when I can’t bear myself anymore, I also like it. Something about endeavouring to stay alive, in the over and over again-ness, tickles my fancy. My bedrock dance practice keeps teaching me this. Every time I show up on the dance floor, I’m moving with the old and the new at the same time. I have a fantasy, and believe me it is a fantasy as I’ve never been in a position to test it out. I very much like the idea that in a sustaining partnership, sex might drop over time, into the pleasures of both repetition and the unknown. Like on the dance floor where I find new life in the old moves. Each familiar breath, equally full of mystery.

So, my musing and meandering about relentless repetition kind of trips me up. I hate it and am comforted by it. I fight and surrender to it. I want a new me but would’t give up the one I am.

I have been worrying at it, partly in relation to writing this blog. How many times can I report from the frontline of what can feel so repetitious? How many words are there for desperate? Or helpless? Or holy? How many breaths in a lifetime? In my lifetime? How many poems in my heart…

And… I’m noticing more in this much quieter terrain. The repetitious nature of things is clearer to see and feel and move in. I take an almost sensual pleasure in baking the same cake over and over again… telling Bebe, how I love her beyond all reason, repeatedly…  lighting a candle every morning as my very first action after finding my feet. Life itself feels like a long, long walk. I suspect there is an old-style pilgrim inside me trying to get out. A pilgrimage from the very first breath to the last. And maybe, it’s just not a problem that I retread my own footsteps and often don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere? Maybe that’s just part of the walk?