Promptings

I’ve been losing out on the whole NoJoMo thing.  I can just never think of anything to write it seems.  Journaling used to be so important to me.  I couldn’t wait to get home and online and start writing.  It was therapeutic and wonderful.  And I love looking back at my old entries to see what I was doing back then.  Its a reminder of my life and how far I’ve come and what I’ve gone through.  What I’m still going through.  But its like there’s a writer’s block or something.  I don’t want to write because I feel that I don’t know how to write.  Its a big ugly spiral.  So I’m going to try some random journal prompts and see if I can’t get back into the swing of it all.  I’ve pulled them from many sources and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some repeats.  A few are from homeschooling or teacher websites, so the questions are a little… juvenile.  But I think it might be good for me.  Make me be less practical sometimes.  Get me out of my comfort zone box.  Like this one…

Would you want to visit the moon?  Why or why not?

The twenty-six year old me thinks about all the hard work it would take to get to the moon.  It thinks about the long trip in such a cramped space with other people.  It thinks about how long the trip would take, and what might I miss in that time.  It considers the dangers of space travel, the uncomfortable looking space suits and all its own dangers.  All of this weighs in my mind and replies with a resounding NO.  I don’t want to visit the moon.

But in the child’s mind in my head, the answer is a whispered yes!  Visit the moon?  Imagine the stars I could see!  Imagine the view of earth!  Imagine the view of the other planets.  There are tons of pictures of the earth from the moon, but I don’t know that there are any of the other planets.  At least they are not well-known.  What about the dark side of the moon?  How is it different that the side that faces earth all the time.  What about when the earth’s shadow falls on the moon, and it is no longer lit up.  How dark is the moon then?  What does weightlessness feel like?  If I were to live on the moon, would I need shelter?  What is shelter really, but a place to keep the weather out.  There is no weather on the moon, so would houses really be necessary?  I suppose you might want a house to keep other people out.  If other people moved to the moon with me.  But could the houses be roofless?  If the walls were high enough to keep others out, could we build houses without roofs?  The stars and space would be the tapestry across the ceiling.  I remember putting glow-in-the-dark stars all over my ceiling to try and mimic the night sky.  I don’t know if its something kids still do or not today, but I know many of my friends did the same thing.  We all wanted to see the stars.  To try and touch them.  Living on the moon, we wouldn’t need the fakes, we could see the real things!

Growing up, one of my favorite things to do was go swimming.  I loved the feeling of weightlessness.  Of being able to tumble and twist and turn all without gravity ending the fun.  What would being in the space shuttle be like?  Floating around without any attraction to anything.  Twisting and turning and flipping.  My favorite movie as a kid was The Little Mermaid, because she got to do all those things.  Back flips, front flips, side flips.  I wanted to move like that.  I did gymnastics as a kid for a number of years.  I used to be able to do cartwheels and some simple tumbling.  But I was always fighting gravity.  Eventually you had to come back down from all the flipping and flying and twisting.  Maybe I just never went far enough with it all.  I remember hearing people talk about how much they love gymnastics because it felt like flying.  It never felt that way to me.  I always felt like I was out of control.  Like gravity and my body were waging a war that was certain to end in pain.  That wouldn’t be the same on the moon.  There’s enough gravity to make it back to the ground (I think), but not enough to send you smashing painfully to the floor.

So I suppose I would want to visit the moon because of the lessened gravity.  I wonder if there were moon people, would they want to visit Earth because of the heightened gravity?  Easier to keep track of things?  Hmm…