The Disruption: punctuation to break the pattern

Imagine reading a novel with just one long run-on sentence. Or you could read one of José Saramago’s novels, and I recommend you do, even to experience the effect of story with minimal punctuation and commas instead of periods. 

“Punctuation … is like traffic signs, too much of it distracted you from the road on which you travelled,” said the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner Saramago about why he eschewed the rules of grammar. Who doesn’t love a literary rebel?

But in my own life, I need those traffic signs. Here’s why.

I’ve been a bit stir-crazy lately. Somedays, I’ll blame the second espresso shot for causing my antsiness. I want to sit, then stand, walk, and seek distractions. March only compounds the impatience rising within. As signs of spring emerge, birdsong, snowdrops bloom, and the curved edges of daffodil leaves poke through the earth, a belated snowstorm hits and blankets us in white. I worry about the chesty robins, all puffed up in the cold. 

It’s not just March that has me this way. After unpacking my thoughts in my morning pages, I realized it’s been nearly five months since I’ve had a disruption. A disruption is a break in the pattern, a change of scenery. It is when you are removed from your routine and home roots for over 48 hours, at the very least, and when you return to your comfort, it’s sweetened by the memory of escape and the familiarity of your nest. This, of course, is my definition.

Life is full of disruptions that we label good or bad. For the sake of this blog, I’d like to focus on disruptions within our control, which could also be a dichotomy of good/bad depending on how the choice plays out. Regardless, you’re dotting the end of your sentence with a period or exclamation mark, for example, and leaving a sign along your path — This Happened Here Because I Decided To Do It.

Some of us thrive in constant disruption, while others fear it. I sit in the middle — at least now I do. In my twenties, I could have lived out of a backpack and slept in a hostel or tent for months on end. By mid-thirty, I started to appreciate the finer comforts of having a place to call home base. 

As I age, I find it easier to compartmentalize my life into chapters. And chapters are made up of sentences which require punctuation marks! If my life was one run-on sentence, I couldn’t digest it all. It would be more of a blur than it is now.

Here is how I’ve broken up my life into chapters starting from when I flew my parents’ coop.

Chapter 1: Backpacking in Australasia

Chapter 2: Directionless undergrad, but that semester in Poland

Chapter 3: Five summers on a golf course

Chapter 4: Running in Japan

Chapter 5: Tourist to local in Thailand

Chapter 6: Getting spiritual in the Himalayas

Chapter 7: J-school (IYKYK) and the many unpaid internships

Chapter 8: My summer with Tibetans in India 

Chapter 9: Finding myself in Northern BC’s rainbow city 

And now… I’m not yet sure what to call this chapter

It’s the big, true disrupter that catalyzes the next chapter. A year ago, we sold our home in Prince Rupert, and my partner and I drove across the country from rainforest to the Rockies, Prairies to Boreal Forest, and into the agricultural hub of Southern Ontario. 

Last year was filled with mini-disrupters that punctuated every month. We moved into a new community on Lake Huron, I travelled back to BC for work several times, flew to Scotland for vacation, and on and on. It was like one of those page-turners that had me tearing through a book late into the evening. By the fall, I was exhausted. 

Now, I’m disruption-deprived. The restless state I’m in, I did to myself. I needed time to settle into my new home and made a commitment to stay put. There were temptations to fly south to the heat and sun. But we stayed and built our nest. 

It has been nearly five months without a disruption nothing to punctuate the weekly pattern I’ve set because of that my story is blurring into one long run-on sentence which is where I disagree with José Saramago the great Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese novelist because it is obvious here even in this little sample that we need punctuation those signposts to stop and smell the flowers and allow ourselves to process the memories or they continue to yield structureless one into the other I think you get the point that we need punctuation.

Next week, I will mark my first punctuation after a long winter of nest building. I will fly my self-imposed coop to explore the other side of Lake Huron, Michigan. There, I will run a trail race fittingly named Carpe Diem Carpe Noctum. Breaking free of my winter pattern, I will seize both day and night, and then a rare total solar eclipse — an astronomical event that will disrupt millions of lives for a few minutes. Where will you be?

A partial solar eclipse I captured with my camera in 2017 from outside the newsroom in Prince Rupert, BC, on Coast Ts’msyen Territory.

Yours Truly,

Fearless Forty