I dropped the box full of coins tonight.
You know, the box, right?, The one everyone has in their room. Where you put the objects you know are not useful today but you hold on to them in the faint hope that one day someone will need them and you will know exactly where you have a spare.
Call that a box with two moist matches inside, the stack of pennies you refuse to carry around but forbid yourself to give away, some times a couple of questionable AA batteries are mixed into the pot.
In my case, it’s a not so small wooden box I’ve had since puberty.
Over the years, -and to this point, almost decades- The box has been a great saviour to me when I know I’ll face a day full of parking meters or small tips. For all these years, the box has remained put, in it’s original scared place and today I dropped it.
It was an astounding sound, one I admit I’d never heard before. Deafening, as more than a hundred coins of different materials, values and nationalities, hit the hardwood floor of my bedroom. Some of them staying right where they fell, others scattering around all over the room, probably rolling as far away as they could, enjoying their spontaneous and unpredicted freedom.
“Why does this kind of shit always happens to me when I’m exhausted?” I asked myself.
All was wrong. The room was a mess. Picking up the coins would’ve probably meant wasting at least fifteen minutes of my precious time lying in bed, eating dry cereal and watching episodes of sitcoms I know by heart.
How dare these coins oppose my sacred regime of procrastination?
After toying with the idea of simply gathering them up and leaving on the floor for a “Better time to pick them up” -If such a thing even existed- and once again surrendering myself to my complete incapability of inhabiting a messy bedroom, I began the dreaded task.
But wait. The torture wasn’t over yet.
I don’t know if any of you, beautiful readers, have ever tried picking a big handful of coins, perfectly resting on the ground at the same time, but if you were as ignorant to the situation as I was, here comes the kicker:
You can’t just gather them up and then lift them off the floor all at once.
It’s not like picking up seeds, or beans.
Coins are flat, and thanks to their shape, gravity -and what I suspect is pure evil on their part-, they have the ability to stick to the flat surface of the floor like amazing and tenacious mutherfuckers.
I tried it all. I tried gathering them all with my hands and then lifting them, cornering them into the wall. Creating levers and exploiting my very limited creativity in physics.
It was all for not.
I came to the horrible realisation (at 12:23am on a Wednesday) That if I was going to pick up my mess, I would have to pick one coin at a time, patiently returning them to their designated home.
And of course, being the overly sentimental and ridiculous person that I am, I managed to turn this terribly mundane and boring experience into a fucking life lesson.
The thing is, I’ve been meaning to write this column for a while now, and I wasn’t sure how to go about it.
It’s a pretty big irony that after making big preaches in my latest column about the importance of persistence and commitment to long term hard work, I put a moratorium on my blog for an entire year.
I wish I could say, “Guys I’m sorry I stopped writing, but wait ‘till you hear the life changing twists that happened to me in the last year, I sold all of my possessions and went to live in an underground ashram where became a Reiki master, saved the elephants and was able to transform and completely find myself. AKA Eat Pray Love can kiss my ass.”
No.
I’m still the same guy.
Things happened. Obviously. Some good, some bad. But blaming the situations that happened around me to justify not making at least three hours a week to continue my blog would be a waste of both our times.
I stopped writing because I chose to stop writing.
It’s as simple as that.
The reasons, however of choosing to stop were not simple.
They were complicated, confusing of different sizes, shapes and colours, just like… (You guessed it) my awesome box of coins!
(See how I did have a point?)
The reason I’m dragging out this seemingly empty and excruciating experience is because I have troubles accepting reality.
My reality is that I stopped writing because I loved my writing and I hated my writing.
Because I thought the blog was great and I feared the blog was garbage.
Because being honest with my emotions and writing about them is a total necessity of mine, yet it makes me feel raw and vulnerable every time I do it.
Because I have a deep fear of failure, and an even deeper fear of success.
All of this potpourri of neurosis, packed into the same pretty wooden box.
I wish I could wrap this up by stating that picking up a bunch useless coins in the middle of the night and wasted what felt like months of my life was a cleansing and transformative experience and that I know have a clear view of who I am, what I want and promise a series of up coming columns that will knock your socks off… But I won’t.
Truth be told, I still have a lot of looking through to do. It is a tedious task that takes a bunch of time and sometimes I go out of my way to avoid doing it, but the thing I have realised is that only by investing the time to pick each coin up and examine it individually will I ever actually understand my own content. What can be tossed away and should be saved for now or the future.
What I do promise is to try and translate and communicate every trite and mundane self epiphany I have in the hopes it’ll ring the bell for someone, somewhere.
I do hope you stick around to see what other knick knacks come up.
