Keep Practicing

I've spent six months with my current cast of characters and one of them needs a different name. The current one is too similar to another character's. This should be easy, just pick something. But it's not because I've lived with the other one for so long. To change names is to change identities. I'm a little annoyed by this, though not in the sense that it's something of great consequence. Just annoying.

I'm also thinking of transitions. What was once important to me now seems trivial. It's odd to be reminded that things were otherwise, to see visual evidence that I used to care about something that hardly feels real. It's like trying to remember a dream after waking. I might recall certain specific events for a while, but eventually it's a giant fog full of nothing more than vague impressions.

In a painfully real sense, that's life. People sometimes talk about letting go as though it's something we can choose to do. No, letting go happens whether we want it to or not. The best we can do is accept it, not fight it so much. It's a physical law, like gravity, not the breakable sort that we create for ourselves.

On the bright side, such finiteness provides immutable parameters in which to function. Boundaries are lain and observed, no matter what. There is no room for doubt about how things begin or end. This should provide more comfort than it usually does. The world is so full of uncertainty, and this is a source of unease. But when we find something that is certain, it causes even greater unease.

This problem should be as easy to solve as renaming my character. And yet, neither is easy. It's like the difference between theory and practice. I dunno, keep practicing?