Paths, Pages and a Circle to Meow

Ovidia--every other Tuesday

We've been renovating our bedroom. At last. After sixty-plus years of ignoring interior décor and living like perennial grad students, we now have closets. Unfortunately it feels like I'm tearing down more stuff on the page than in the bedroom!
The good side is, I think the space kind of looks nice (Before and after pictures below).
And it feels like a small but definite victory.

This is Before--same metal shelving as we used in our office spaces.

And after. Yes, that's me in the mirror I wasn't aware of before!

This definitely cleared some physical and mental clutter; we discovered the television is larger than we'd realised and that we have games we bought but never played.
Which is where the Circle to Meow comes in:

'Stray' is a PS5 game where you play a little cat exploring dark alleyways, chased by swarming things called Zurks. Those glowing spots in the photo are Zurk eyes. They're like really nasty bloated-on-blood ticks that pile onto to your cat character until it dies.
And yes, we died again and again and again.
It seemed like a hopeless case till we discovered the Circle Button on the Controller.

I realise that in the West, the circle button tends to mean Cancel, but here it often means Confirm and, more importantly--in this game anyway--it means Meow. And that Meow turns out to be the survival action here. When you press the circle button and Meow, the Zurks get surprised and shaken off.

It's something I'm going to try to apply when I feel overwhelmed and stuck. Till now the only options seemed to be rage/despair quitting or battering blindly through (while the blood sucking Zurks pile on and simultaneously suffocate and exsanguinate you) but now there's the option to stop and Meow and see if there's the option to zigzag.

Because as long as I'm on the path, I'm still alive, even if I feel stuck. Or maybe it's that as long as you’re still alive, you’re still somewhere on the path.

And there's the book path too.
I'd thought I was almost done--and then I saw how one little shift could make it a hundred times better. Even if that slight shift means chucking/rewriting most of the 65,000 words I've got down so far.

I know it's crazy stupid (especially with the deadline coming up next month) but once you see the magic 'it' there's really no choice.

So I'm be staying on the book path and meowing (and zig-zagging) instead of quitting.