A disquieting afternoon

I cannot focus. I know exactly what needs to be done but I cannot focus on it — because it doesn’t really pull at me the way it once did. Yes I can practice reframing, reshaping, repositioning my thoughts but nothing can change the fact that I no longer care. I’ve spent my whole life caring about school, work and now I don’t. Such a strange, disquieting feeling. There has to be another word to replace the disquiet.

It’s not a nervousness, it’s that moment you know you should jump but you pause letting the unease of possibilities fill you. And still you hesitate because you need another word to fill the disquiet and you haven’t quite found it yet.

I find myself being restive — balking at going forward, wanting to just remain in place yet knowing there is no way this can be. The nature of the working life is to move forward, to have a sense of progress. I want ingress, not progress (the opposite of which is regress — so not quite the opposite). I want to, as my yoga teacher says, “workin not workout.”

Ingress is perhaps the right word — the noun not the verb, a secondary meaning — “the action upon entering or beginning a thing” (OED). Yes, this is where I am, on the cusp of action, of entering, of beginning a thing and I know not what it is.

The poem by Adrienne Rich comes to mind again, I write it parts of it below:

Integrity

She who dances

A wild patience has taken me thus far

as if I had to bring to shore a boat with a spasmodic outboard motor
old sweaters, nets, spray-mottled books
tossed in the prow

…..

The length of daylight 
this far north, in this
forty-ninth year of my life
is critical.

The light is critical: of me, of this
long-dreamed, involuntary landing
on the arm of an inland sea.

….

What I want is intention.