Blinkingly, I stick my head outside my cave. The sunlight seems foreign to me now. It stings but in a strangely comforting way, like antiseptic on a grazed knee.
Words are not so easy when all the communication I’ve done lately is long distance or through the medium of Gilmore Girls marathon.
Isolation can be healing. It can give you time to know yourself, time to heal, time to decide your next move but it can also be stagnation. Stagnation festers and lulls you into a cycle of inactivity.
Inside the cave there is warmth and Plato-esque shadows of the wider world. The shadows can almost fool you into thinking that you’re still living a life, that you’re still in contact with people and that you have nothing to fear.
But outside the cave there are a lot of people who have been patiently waiting for you. There also lots of people and experiences that aren’t patiently waiting at all, they’ve moved on and now you’ve missed them.
But the longer you stand at the entrance to your own personal prison, guilt-ridden and terrified of all the things you messed up by taking the hermit choice of cave-life, the longer you are still wasting time.
So there’s a step to take, a leap of faith and a plunge and so many other wonderful clichés. Yes, there is a world of wonderful clichés and terrible originality and mind-blowing variation out there that will keeping on spinning whatever you choose to do. Unless what you choose to do is build a electro-magnetic weapon so powerful it disrupts the earth’s magnetic poles.
But mostly likely it will keeping on spinning and you will keep on breathing until someday you don’t.
So knowing all that, ask yourself. What do you WANT to do today?
Orla ní Dhúill 