Catching My Breath

In life, there are those quiet weeks that pass you by -- boring and solitary weeks, weeks of ennui and lethargy where your existence is comprised of the mundane. Go to work. Go home. Go to sleep. Wake up and do it again the next day. You're going through the motions of life, living a routine existence, rolling through each day without a whimper or a word of protest. Before long, each day acquires an insidious gray sameness. Eventually all of your days become indistinguishable and you're not living anymore. You're pretending to live.

Unfortunately, this malaise is all too common and if not attended to, it can drive you into a rut. A years-long, 60 feet-below-ground, suffocating, life-deadening rut. You end up feeling that nothing can or ever will change. You get mired in it. You bathe in it. You surround yourself with it. The negativity. The cynicism. The blah. Unfathomable boredom and apathy. The rut becomes your unwanted guest, a rude bastard who pees on your carpet, stains your sofa, and grossly overstays his welcome. No matter how polite you are, no matter how much you try convincing him that his presence is no longer desired (and never was), he won't leave. It seems that the harder you try to get rid of the rut, the more entrenched it becomes.

But... BUT, once in awhile, without any warning, without invitation, seemingly by accident, you experience a week unlike any other, a week where the dark shade lifts and the world becomes a kaleidoscope of born-again wonder. The old looks new again. All of a sudden you're approaching the world like a child. You're letting intuition and flow take you down the river like a boat with its own GPS. You're taking whatever comes, good and bad. New experiences, new people, new places. All of sudden, you acquire new ways of looking at things. You see the connections and the lessons you're supposed to learn. You see the purpose of the rut and of all the crappy things that go wrong in life. And you're like, hmmmm this is good. I need to do this more often. I need to make more time for things like this. I need to make this feeling last. I need to make it a bigger part of my life. Later you realize that it wasn't anything unique that brought the change in thinking. It was just taking a break from your routine, taking a chance on something new, making the time, being open to people, and being available to whatever comes. It's amazingly simple, though not easy, particularly if you've got my kind of personality.

No, I'm not high.

Instead of dumping the events of the past ten days on you all at once, I want to take the time to give them each their due. So tune in over the July 4th weekend, when I'll be visiting the rentals in the Shire and I'll have the time to get it all down.