“All beginnings are hard.”

So Chaim Potok begins his 1975 novel, “In the Beginning”.

All beginnings are hard, but so are all endings.

Yesterday, Tim’s 18 year-old cat, Rosencrantz, finally said goodbye after a pretty good run and a late fight with kidney issues. That’s a good age for a kitty. And being at Tim’s cat resort, I suspect he had a very good life for a cat as well. He joins his sibling Guildenstern in the earth in the cat cemetery on Tim’s property.

Today, my friend Chris had to say goodbye to his family dog Fred, the sibling of a pair that they’d had for 12 years, and the survivor of the two for a short spell, when Mac passed half a year ago or so.

Endings happen, and some are better than others, but they are inevitable.

I’ve tried to write something on this blog every day since January 1, 2017, and I think have done it. A few days, the posts were fantastic- several stories that brewed up spur of the moment, and a clutch of poems that dictated themselves to me. Many posts were casual but informative. And a number, and I think especially so over the last few months, have been forced, thin, and lifeless posts. And I’ve felt that lately- me trying to force myself to be clever, or witty, or insightful, or wise, or even entertaining, while I’ve felt like I’ve had nothing worth saying for a while.

So I am giving myself a formal release today, on this 28th of January, 2018, to not write on here tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next. Or for a while.

It’s not an excuse for me NOT to write, but rather, an excuse for me to write more purposefully on projects, on writings that I don’t have to feel I must finish in a sitting for an evening post.

I’ve put this gesture off for a little while because I hate to quit things I start. I may not be good at the thing I start, but if I get in a groove and am consistent with it, I hate to quit it, because a little in there, in that act of quitting, is a tinge of failure. And I hate that feeling, failure.

So I will just make it an announced break and congratulate myself on staying with it for 14 months, and slap myself on the back, and not let failure in.

But I will keep writing. That’s the reason for the break.

And what I come up with will inevitably find its way on here sooner or later, for sure.

I’d like to rething what this blog is, or what it should be, also. I am now just posting things to get so many words out of my head and onto a website each day. I’d like to be posting for more of a purpose.

And some of that purpose needs to grow in some silence.

All endings are hard. Probably because they are also the new beginnings that Potok talks about.

I’ll be back in a bit.