Why?

Years ago, in the last century–how odd it seems to say that, and yet, history is then and that history includes much of my life, and some amount of yours, if you are not a child of the 2000s–I wrote and occasionally saw published short stories. I liked writing them. I diligently researched, through the extant writers’ markets periodicals or literary and small press periodicals themselves, a place to submit my stories. I received probably hundreds of rejection slips or, one step up–letters. In the mail! In the SASE’s I would enclose in the 9×12″ envelope with my submitted stories. But I also received acceptances, and two of them may have paid in something other than accolades or a free copy of the publication, paid, rather in a modicum of cash.

I do not write short stories anymore. No, not totally true, I have, in the 2000s, written one completed short story, two nearly completed before I quit, and about five false starts. I do not know why I stopped. Perhaps my imagination quit. Perhaps I could no longer think out a life, or a day in a life of a character whose name and identity began entirely in my head.

There are other things I have stopped doing, things that for a span I couldn’t get enough of, and then I would realize over time that this thing I do, I don’t anymore.

What is that about us? I mean, I know I am not the only one here who has ended a practice, a pastime, a hobby, a thing from which I derive pride, or satisfaction, or pleasure, or learning, or, or any combination of these responses. Why did its draw run out? And why did another’s enter?

Where have you not explored that you might want to? What have you not tried? Why? Why not? And someday perhaps you will. Why?

And what makes one keep up with what one does?

And what determines our subject(s) of interest? Is it genes? Sympathies? Concerns? Education? Friends? Neighborhoods? News? And what shapes our opinions and how tightly we hold them?

Have you ever quit a closely held belief? Faith? Hope? Why? Have you chosen a belief, faith, hope? Why?

I did. Why? Because I recognized the need the importance to become someone-me rather than the present someone-me. Of this choice made many years ago now, but in this century, I am glad.

Why not? Let’s….