The Wheel Weaves as the Wheel Wills

 It is ten minutes until five in the morning as I unexpectedly find myself at the keyboard to write this post. I woke up a few hours ago coughing from this most recent cold. Since I had COVID-19 back in March of this year, it seems as if I catch everything that cycles around. I am thankful that my immune system and over-the-counter medication makes short work of most of it. Still, I feel the change in myself and it is not a welcome one. That might be apparent to any regular reader as I talk about it bitterly. 

With the house dark and the Mucinex doing its work I should have been back asleep within an hour or so. I was surprised at myself being wide awake when my daughter started whining in the early hours from a nightmare. It was good to be awake to soothe her back to sleep and to tuck her back into her bed. With that though I was firmly awake and the likeliest return to sleep was going to be found reading a book. That was where I made my mistake. I have been rereading the Wheel of Time series because of course I would. The amazon show is excellent if very different from the original novels. 

I read the first several books of Wheel of Time in the early 90s. I want to say I picked up the paperback of Eye of the World around age 11. I had not discovered Terry Goodkind and his Sword of Truth series which would grab me with a much darker theme. Robert Jordan had my attention from having read several of his fantastic Conan tales. I was willing to give his own fantasy world a try. 

For a few years Wheel of Time was a personal favorite. I got a little older and in the years that gave birth to grunge, the attitude area of wrestling, and more anti-hero characters from Deadpool to the Crow than I care to think about I wanted grim and grittier tales. As I mentioned before, Sword of Truth took the attention for my fantasy reading when I wasn't knee deep in Stephen King's Dark Tower... or really any of the wordsmith's books. For that matter I spent far too many days in the company of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. 

There are several lines that are repeated throughout Wheel of Time.  One of my favorite tatologies is," The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills." Jordan took the very secular," What goes around comes around," added a deeper sense of prophecy and penned a line for the ages. I also think age and experience shows us humans that the world does run in repetitive cycles. Don't think so? 

The fact that fantasy novels penned in the mid 1980s found their way into a nerdy preteen's hands is no great surprise. Those same stories being shaped into a popular TV show some thirty years later seems a strong indication of the phenomenon. Let's add evidence that in six days Boba Fett who really captured the imagination of a generation of nerds in the late 70s and early 80s is getting his own TV series. Oh, and yesterday the fourth Matrix movie launched in theaters and streamed directly into my living room. If The Matrix did not perfectly close out the attitude era in 1999 I cannot think of anything else that did. 

It is funny though. What got me thinking about cycles in life was not all this epic rotation. Even Tobey Maguire being in a Spider-man movie which started back in 2002 (he is in No Way Home, right?) wasn't enough to send me down this line of thought. No, it was buying the third book of Wheel of Time on the kindle and Amazon kindly offering to let me pick up the audiobook for only an additional $7.49. I thought to myself, not for the first time in my life,"What would be the advantage in spending that $7.49? I never listen to audiobooks."

That is the thing though. Not that long ago I did listen to quite a few audiobooks. I had been opposed to them for years for no specific reason I can recall. I want to say I doubted I would be able to follow along with the narrative while just sitting around listening to it. I have always been a epic multitasker, but that skill which can apply to writing, drawing, coding, drafting, watching TV, listening to music, and a whole array of bodily functions does not apply to reading. When I read I tend to only be reading. No radio playing. No TV for background noise. Just me and a book. I could not imagine having on a pair of headphones (please pictures these as the slender metal band with the foam covered ear pieces popularized with the Walkman style) sitting around doing nothing but listening to an audiobook. 

My old friend Chris Kraft changed that for me. We were prepping for GenCon the first year I was able to go. I was going to be driving from Knoxville to Indy with a high likelihood I would be alone for the trip. I love to drive. I prefer to be engaged and entertained while I do so. A big moving truck is not so novel an experience that it would entertain me for 11 hours of highway driving. 

I had been frustratedly planning musical playlists. I knew it wouldn't hold my interest. I was starting to consider podcasts which, ironically, don't hold my interest well. Kraft suggested audiobooks. He had picked out a few for the trip. He liked to listen to them on his commutes. He also listened to them while he worked. He could plow through a book a day on good days. 

I was envious. At the height of my reading fervor I was reading a book a day. I devoured much of my Conan, Dragonlance, and Forgotten Realms novels during that age. I couldn't get enough time to read. When I had the time I could not get enough to read. It was a good problem. Life had caught up to me and I had slowed down to reading a few hours a week before bed each night. I was getting through a book or so per week. 

Kraft's suggestion of Audiobooks changed that. On that one trip to GenCon I listened to Ready Player One and the first three books of the Harry Potter series. All of them were books I had read before. I was hedging my bets a bit. I knew those stories well. I figured if my attention waivered then I would still be able to enjoy the story in pieces. It was a baseless worry. 

It started a cycle for me. I would eventually feel totally comfortable listening to new stories via audiobook. I could get through a few audiobooks a week during my commute and still read myself to sleep each night. It was great. 

Like a lot of things the pandemic changed the habit. My audiobook habit ended with my daily commute. I didn't have two hours a day to fill with the soothing voices of various narrators. In the confines of my home I did briefly play with my Alexa being an audiobook device of choice. It didn't work. My multitasking superpowers didn't need the stimulus with all of the other options available to me. I haven't bought an audiobook in a while.

As I sat with my finger poised over the check box that would add Audible narration to The Dragon Returns I thought over all of this with a mixture of sadness and relief. I miss working in the warehouse where I could drop my earbuds in and enjoy hour after hour of story while picking orders. I miss hearing stories while leaning into curves on the bike riding to and from work. I can imagine a commute again though not in the near future. I am certain audio books will become important to me again. Now just isn't that time. 

Life is like that. It is hard to see the closer you are to the start of your life because you have lived through less of the pattern repeating itself. The younger you are the more that you see things as exciting, new, and different. Over a long enough timeline most things are an echo of something that has happened before. Stories are told and become popular, they become common, they fade, they are forgotten, and they wait to be dusted off and told again. 

I think quite a bit of wisdom comes from pattern recognition. By looking at what has happened before you can be prepared for when it comes back around again. I know this sounds like common sense, but there is nothing common about it. We all have trouble breaking our own negative patterns for better ones that have proven to produce better results. 

I recently saw a familiar weave in the pattern. I felt myself drawn into it as I have always been. Experience spoke into my mind. I stopped myself from slipping further into the pattern. "The timing is wrong," I told myself with a sense of sadness. Stepping back I saw the pattern pass me by. I was saddened by breaking the pattern because it felt exciting but also familiar and comfortable. Those patterns are well worn grooves in the vinyl of our souls. Sometimes though, if you want to change your life, you have to play a different song. Sometimes you need to play that song you know and love, but you have to play it and exactly the right time to have it hit differently. 

There is great power and comfort in the ability to break the pattern. Being able to say," No. The timing is not right," is the essence of self control. Saying that with confidence that there is a time that will be right is amazing. It will allow you to let go of things that feel familiar and comfortable that are not good for you and instead nourish your soul. That makes the waiting and the wanting craving for what you want much easier to bear. 

I have let go of quite a few familiar and comfortable things lately. I stopped recording the podcast with Garin because the timing was not right. I am stopping comics for a while. I haven't been riding my motorcycle like I used to. The timing has been off. I have felt that keenly. Even as I write this I want to reach out to Garin and arrange a recording, jump on my bike and go for a ride, and pick up a stack of comic from my LCS but it is not that time. I need to be nourishing myself in other ways. 

Just like audiobooks the time for all of those things will come around. As if I can see the future I can tell you with certainty I will be riding a motorcycle down the interstate while listening to Ready Player One as read by Wil Wheaton on my way to buy comic books. It will happen and in that moment, probably somewhere around the I-40/ I-640 split I will remember writing this with a strong sense of deja vu that will give me a cold chill. I even suspect I will have bought myself a new motorcycle helmet by then. 

The cool thing about that is I have no idea if I am seeing the future or just envisioning the high probability of a series of very predictable events. For my purposes, what difference does it really make? I take comfort in knowing that I will follow patterns where I should and with any luck experience will help me avoid the self destructive patterns that repeat themselves all too regularly in life. 

Most of all though I am happy that a little check box in a transaction on the kindle can spark my imagination and inspiration enough to give me big profound thoughts that I can share with the few people who care enough to read them. I hope that is a pattern that never breaks, but,"The Wheel weaves as the wheel wills." Sometimes we are all just along for the ride.