Opposites Attract

It must be Murphy's Law...

Hiya guys. Another day. Another blog. I have not written much last week. For some reason only immortal gods will ever know, each time I write more than my share of work, and brag about it, the next day or even couple of days nothing gets done. I've had this all my life actually so I should know better. Each time I say something that sums up a particular feeling, a stroke of good luck or simply an observation and judgement, the first thing that happens next is that my theory gets blown away.

If I say I'm lucky one day, the next day I am not. If I am in a funk and completely depresses, something comes along and helps me get over it again. If I state bigger things like we're gonna stay in country A before you know it we have to move to country B. It is always something. The only assurance that I more or less had was that in the odd years of the 'noughties' (2000-2010) something happened that upset my life in some way or another. Usually followed by a year of bliss. Let's see: 2001: first major love broke up with me (2002: quit job, left for Africa). 2003: lost job teaching in Africa (2004: married to Nancy). 2005: rough pregnancy/1st 6 weeks of birth in Holland (2006: moved to lovely Ireland). 2007: Mother dies & dengue fever (and plenty of other miserable events) in Sri Lanka (2008: moved to exotic and bountiful Thailand). And then...2009. I thought for sure something would happen in 2009 that would upset me big time, but....nothing. Our wonderful life in Bangkok continued on. Oh, well I guess I did end up without work at the end of the year.

There is something to be said for some cosmic balance or another I guess. Each time something happened to upset my life, an opportunity arose from it. Like a lotus flower rises from a patch of watery mud, so did the major good things in my life. The break-up with my girlfriend in 2001 caused me to rethink my life and go to Africa as a volunteer. Even though I lost my job there, I met Nancy who was also escaping an increasingly hostile environment back home. We got married the next year. Even though a hurricane swept through our honeymoon island, we had insurance and got to go for free on another honeymoon where Alex was conceived. The complicated pregnancy and rough patch in Holland caused us to become more proactive and assertive in what we wanted to do and where we wanted to live. Ireland and our consultancy firm was the result of that. We impulsively jumped on board to Sri Lanka to work for the Red Cross, but it won Nancy a glowing custom-made job in Thailand the next year, a place we've come to love and appreciate every day. And finally me losing my main work as an IT consultant has given me the opportunity to passionately invest myself in my 3-year writing project.

So I guess every downside is like having a stretch of farmland rest for a year, before using again to grow food. It doesn't seem to bear any fruit for that time and you think you've lost your treasures, but the next year the results of that are laid bare. So I might not write all the time or even to the maximum amount of words I'd like to, but I could just be replenishing my energies and getting the Muses to sleep in for a morning before the fountain of creativity once again flows with prose. But just in case it needs a little motivation let me invoke that Murphy's Law by saying:

My writing is hopelessly lacking this week and I don't think anything is going to come to me this week.

So there, I've upped the ante. Let the cosmic balance rock and roll.