Going Inkless

     Some months ago, I was stopped by an employee as I walked through the store.  The young man only stated that I had a very confident stride, and then he moved on.  There was no follow up offer to direct me toward my goal.  The kid was half my age, so this was no flirtation.  It was simply a random compliment from a stranger.  Who knows?  Maybe he was a theatre student just trying to be observant about the way people move.  I was focused at  the time, knew what I wanted to buy and where to find it.  So, chances are, I was moving in a direct fashion.  It wouldn't be unusual.  The comment threw me momentarily, but I found it amusing and continued my course with a smile.      Now, months later, I still think about it.  For one thing, I am more conscious of the way I walk.  As a writer, naturally, I paid attention to all the ways people tend to move, and I wasn't unaware of my own tendencies....

     We make promises to ourselves, and we break them.  We feel guilty, and the guilt can even eclipse the real consequences of the broken promise.  Guilt, or the threat of it, is a tool we use to keep ourselves on task, but that tactic can turn on us.  Too many broken promises, and you learn not to make them.  It's hard to make the leap from "want" to "goal" when you're afraid you're not good enough to get it done.  So you stay where it's safe, and you sacrifice the possibility of accomplishment to "someday."      Here's the truth that you need to swallow before you can make good things happen in your life: You are destined to fail. You will promise yourself things that you won't be able to deliver.  You will set goals you never reach.  It may be circumstances beyond your control that knock you off that ladder; it may be that the timing wasn't right for success, but you will fail. Sometimes. and then, sometimes,...

     I've always had an uneasy relationship with the act of throwing things away.  Like most things this deeply felt, it's been with me from childhood and probably has no clear incident at its root.  For one thing, as a child, throwing things out probably means that you were pressed into some pointless cleaning exercise like straightening your room.  Maybe you spent too many Wednesday nights dragging heavy metal trash cans to the curb.  So, it's bound to carry some negative associations.  For another thing, growing up poor means your small catalog of thing you have is diminishing by one every time something goes in the trash.  You think twice about it when you live under the cloud of never having enough.  If something could still be useful, you tend to hang on to it because it saves you doing without in the future.  In my house, all our hand-me-down clothes were handed down through five sisters and into the rag-bag after they became...