Just Like Sherlock Holmes

For the past few months I've been re-reading the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and enjoying Masterpiece's presentations on PBS.  The stories have provided escape from the here and now of life after my dad.

It was my dad who taught me that Holmes dabbled in cocaine;they didn't teach us that part in school.  Sure enough when I read the stories on my own, there it was.  But you know how (if you're lucky) every time you read a story you get something new out of it?  That happened to me this time around.

I was reading Doyle's  The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter (The Strand Magazine, 1904) when I came across this paragraph, of Watson describing Holmes: 
Things had indeed been very slow with us, and I had learned to dread such periods of inaction, for I knew by experience that my companion's brain was so abnormally active that it was dangerous to leave it without material upon which to work.  For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career.  Now I knew that under ordinary conditions he no longer craved for this artificial stimulus, but I was well aware that the fiend was not dead, but sleeping; and I have known that the sleep was a light one and the waking near when in periods of idleness I have seen the drawn look upon Holmes's ascetic face, and the brooding of his deep-set and inscrutable eyes.

Yep, Sherlock, I know how you feel.  When I'm active and my mind is engaged, it's easy to stay on the straight and narrow.  But when life's greatest adventures are laundry and dirty dishes -- when I'm as restless as a polar bear in a zoo enclosure in July, my habit has been The Adventure of the Salt or Sugar. 

Now, it doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to realize the danger in this behavior, but it does take courage to move out of the familiar to take on new challenges, a bit of confidence in one's self and abilities, and a Watson to lend a little support.  As I wrote earlier this week, I'm working on rebuilding my confidence and I've already found a little of it.  I've also got more Watsons than I deserve.  So now it's time for adventure again.