Being & Bleeding

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, and didn't,

bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

Honore De Balzac

Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like if I was still practicing law. If I was still clicking away in marble corridors between conference rooms. If I was still wearing pinstripes and pearls. Would I be happy? Would I have found my place, my way, my voice? Would I be respected, revered, even feared? Would my heart and head and home be different places than they are today?

What if I had never made the leap? What if I had never listened to that voice, soft at the time, that said: You want to write? What if I had stayed there, in that tall building, at my desk piled high with documents that numbed me? What then? Would my swelling need to tell stories have faded away? Would I have forgotten my slow-forming dream to write books? Would I have shelved my deepest urge to weave words into tapestries unique and universal?

I don't know. But I don't think so.

I imagine that my desire to do something different, to be something different, would have seeped, a glorious gray or deep bloody red, over the black and white life I tried to convince myself of. I imagine that words and sentences and stories would have crept their way into my mind, burrowing in beautifully, until I paid them some attention.

I don't know.

Where do dreams and desires go when we deny them? Where do the parts of us we can't pursue end up? What happens to the whole of existence, the fabric of our being, when there is so much bleeding?

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• Have there been vocations you wanted to pursue and didn't?
• Do you ever wonder what your life would be like if you'd taken a different path?
• Do you think that dreams and desires disregarded (because of fear, prudence, etc) come back to haunt us?
• Do you think identity is one part the being of who we are and one part the bleeding of colors of who we could have been?