Sleep and time and conversation… Those are my healers, the restorative balms for my battle-weary soul, the shapers of my amorphous muddle. I’m awake again. After an insomniac week, a coupla night–>noon sleep binges, several rich talks with beloved buddies*, I’m awake. I’m awake.
I’ve been staying in my old apartment, in my old room, for the past four days (who says you can’t go home again?) and just realized that the internet network password, which I had staunchly insisted was invalid!, had, indeed, been valid, quite valid, valid the whole time, just case-sensitive. Can you believe I never tried it with an uppercase initial letter? That’s a no-brainer. But never did. Never tried. Assumed my intel was faulty or my computer impaired. (To be technical, the intel was a smidgen faulty since it hadn’t been texted to me in its case-sensitive glory, nor scrawled on the refrigerator whiteboard as such, but still… And my computer sometimes does hate a local network, but still… Still.) Aren’t you just boonswoggled by the metaphorical weight of this? Assumed the worst. Ignored innovation. Smugly suffered. Doesn’t that sound like most Greek tragedies, and everybody’s foreign policy?
Now, “the glass is half-full” rejoinder would be: But I’ve woken up! I’m out-of-the-box-thinking, humility-remembering, lesson-learning-for-next-timing! And I’ve got another day and a half to enjoy super smooth Internet stylings!
True. Good. Excessively beating your breast is just as self-absorbed as assuming everyone else is wrong but you. (Not that self-indulgence is so alien around these parts. I offer the name of my domain as Exhibit A, the fact of this blog’s existence as Exhibit B…) Hopefully, in my re-engagement with the world around me, I operate a bit wiser, negotiate a trifle better, enriched for having gone on this journey. I think such a thing possible. I might sense a little more perspective… We’re all just people trying our best. Just people. Love us before it’s too late. (That’s the truth Mom and I independently discovered and exchanged two days ago. “Make sure to enjoy your life” is the nugget my dad shared tonight.)
I recently welcomed a friend to the prologue of the next chapter. But it wasn’t just his** and mine — it’s mine and mine. Mine and all of ours. This is a post-quals world, right? Post-May. Pre-summer. Pleine d’opportunite, as they’d say in French. Six em!, as we’d cry to the Pop-o-Matic bubble…
Onward.
*from a distance: Mom, Jim, Rebecca, and Mark; in the flesh: Geetha, Jinah, Jenn
**he, who is just a person, a person trying his best, like the rest of us