I have a new coaster for my coffee mug these days. It’s a ticket I got for parking, legally I thought, in a hospital parking deck. The deck, tucked amid a labyrinth of distracting construction scaffolding, walkways and orange cones, is a visitor lot. And I was a visitor, attending a meeting there. I failed, however, to see a large sign swinging over the automated gate at the garage entrance. This sign clarified that I had to be visiting a patient. I didn’t see it because I was looking at the clock-in box, the gate itself, and the bumper of the car in front of me. I cite a research study in which a random sample of people were asked to watch a basketball video. Midway through, a large man in a gorilla costume walked across the court, and more than half the study subjects did not notice. I would have been in that half.

I've been reading Brene Brown's Rising Strong. I like Brene Brown. She's funny and self-effacing. She writes in a way that somehow makes you feel as though you are her friend, that she'd actually wave at you from across a crowded room. Rising Strong is about recovering from failure. Brene bases the book on a Teddy Roosevelt quote I taped to my computer a decade ago, not realizing how appropriate it would seem years into starting a business that reminds me at times of a sick dog tied to a tree. The quote is too long for a blog. The gist of it is this: it’s easy to criticize. It’s messy, hard and humiliating to do anything worth doing. But it is better to dare greatly and fail than not to dare at all.

Almost since I can remember, I’ve been gifted or cursed, as the case may be, by the ability to achieve a totally mindful state when I’m concentrating on something. I literally become, to use a Buddhist term, ‘one’ with whatever has caught my attention, to the exclusion of all else, no matter how clamorous. I first became aware of this capacity at age six. I remember being snapped back to my surroundings, a Formica topped table ringed with children, by a substitute teacher, who smacked me on the head with one of those fat pencils designed for tiny hands.

I was once assigned to write a feature article on an osteoporosis treatment that involved repairing crumbled vertebrae with injectable cement. I went to the hospital to watch this procedure one morning and was given, to my surprise and trepidation, a full set of surgical scrubs. Somewhere in the midst of the resulting article, I corrupted the popular saying You are what you eat by substituting for “eat” the word “wear.” And neither my editor nor I caught this slip-up before the magazine went out. Well, that was a long time ago, and I didn’t care a great deal about what I ate. I lived on Chinese takeout and peanut butter crackers.

Our world is needlessly complicated. Honestly. I just spent five days trying to decipher HTML code to unscramble a digital file, fraught with errors. I could only allow myself to peck carefully at the weird strings of symbols because I had made several copies of this horrible file and scattered them around my virtual desktop. I’d open one now and then, just to be certain my tinkering hadn’t mysteriously migrated, and that I could always revert back to the original mess.

Early this morning,* I was sitting at my computer flapping the hem of my turtleneck to make full use of the chilly morning air. I was trying to counteract the effects of the fickle, internal furnace (with some kind of weird short in the wiring) which sprang up within my inner being shortly after turning fifty. And I was wearing reading glasses at a strength of 2.75. It’s very difficult to find stronger ones in the drugstore.

I haven’t blogged in slightly more than eight months, which is cyber-eternity. It is not, however, book-writing-publicizing eternity. It is the blink of an eye. Several years ago (a few more blinks of the eye) I started a publishing venture in much the same way I started snow skiing. To ski, I reasoned in the bloom of youth, one needs only four things: nerve, correct clothing, a pair of skis, and a snow-covered hill. In my complete ignorance, I assumed that finding cheap, flattering, waterproof pants and a matching jacket posed the greatest challenge in this list. After all, with waxed slats strapped to my feet, how could I fail, given my basic sense of balance, to do anything other than plummet gracefully if I stood at the top of a slick slope and aimed myself in a downward direction?

Several years ago I quoted Tolstoy on my Christmas card. Tolstoy compared writing a book to creating a monster, eventually flung out upon the public by a writer desperate to be rid of it. Tolstoy used this analogy because he lived before the era of Facebook, Twitter, eBooks, and the myriad other means of electronic communication we have at our impulsive fingertips. Writing a book in the new millennium is not like creating a monster. It’s like creating an entire zoo of monsters, all tethered to your computer.

I spend most of my waking hours struggling with words and the many means we have nowadays of putting our words out there. Sometimes I make very bad mistakes with words. My latest very bad mistake was assuming that, having been involved for many years in the selling of horses, I could, similarly, sell a house. I mean, there is only the difference of an 'r' and a 'u.'