The last few weeks I’ve been waking up before the alarm. 5:48 am, 6:02 am; this morning, 5:56 am. It is not as if I have been getting to bed any earlier, usually around 11 pm or midnight. Sometimes, I will feel awake enough to get up and out the door and get my run out of the way for the day. Sometimes, I’ll feel alert enough to sit and write and get my blog entry done before heading to work. But most mornings, I just lay quietly, waiting for my sleepy body to catch up with my wide-awake eyes.
Lately, I’ve been feeling…off-kilter. February has been an eventful month in my highly-regulated and predictable routine of a life which I have so carefully designed. Things have happened as of late that have given me pause. Not a “pause” as in a Joycian epiphany-scaled pause or a giant-fluorescent-light-bulb-turning-on-above-my-head-type-of-pause. Wouldn’t that be convenient? For me, a random string of events have slowly unraveled to reveal…what? I’m not sure. I squint my eyes to try and make some sense of my life right now but my feelings about the last few weeks still hover over my head like fireflies impossible to catch.
It’s 2:30 in the morning and I slipped out of bed because I hadn’t submitted an entry for the day yet. Somedays, you just have to wait to see what happens. Today was one of those days. I wanted to wait and see how my day and evening would unfold before I sat and finished this entry. But now it’s already 3:25 am and it is officially Thursday, February 24. A lifetime of watching 22-minute episodic television has lured me into thinking the chapters in our lives should have a denouement. Shoot! I know better than that. People spend years trying to figure out their lives and it’s ridiculous of me to expect answers…now, right now, please, for the love of Pete!
We are imperfect creatures. We want, we desire, we disappoint, we struggle, we question, we ruminate, we plan, we act, we succeed, we fail, we love, we hate. It would be so easy to slip into a self-imposed paralysis, for fear of…everything. If I was to take a piece of paper and split it down the middle, one side being “Things I’m Unsure Of” and the other side, “Things I’m Sure Of”, I would come up with the list of a hundred “unsure things” and maybe one or two “sure things”. Sure things rarely happen in real life. But when you do come across them, like the love of good friends or the unbelievable luck you had in ending up in a loving family, you’ll want to hold that knowledge close to your heart.
Do you really need that much more?
