Viscous Cycles

"Time keeps on slippin' slippin' slippin'
into the future."

You know it's a bad sign when a Steve Miller song seems profound to you.  Yet, life feels awfully viscous these days, and I'm trying like crazy to grab onto it.

A migraine and a list of realizations woke me around 3 this morning.  I could do little to appease either, so I finally gave up and got up.  And now I'm pondering that list.  The items that weigh most heavily on me include my children's impending departures, my friends' continuing struggles, my job's upcoming requirements.

 Try as I might, I've never been a particularly adept juggler.  And I can be downright pathetic when it comes to weight distribution, misguidedly putting too much emphasis on the lesser things.  A person could make a pretty decent argument, I suppose, that these are the sloppy realities of being human.  Still, it can be hard to make my peace with these discrepancies.

So, instead of fully committing to any one item on my list, I end up skirting them all.  Like a dragonfly alighting on the water for the briefest of moments, only to be drawn away by something fluttering off in the distance. Call it a form of pain management, this segmentation of things.

I can hardly imagine August 16th, when son Eric wakes up in Sweden for the first time.  And because I can hardly imagine it, I turn my attention elsewhere.  To friends whose days are filled with doctors' offices and question marks.  But those lives get heavy awfully fast and, well, my shoulders are shot.  So I let my eyes wander over to Allison, whose room is quickly filling with dorm-sized bedsheets and storage bins.  This sight, too, hurts my eyes and heart, though, so I let something else distract me . . . .

This is the cycle I find myself in, then, one of motion and deception and pain management. . . and joy and silliness, too, which is part of the problem.

Who am I, after all, to get a case of the giggles in the midst of all these real-world challenges?   But who am I to deny the healing power of a good belly laugh?

When sun meets earth and body finds bed each night, it is this complicated, lovely, aching mess called "life" that I lay down beside, my mind awhirl with a thousand conflicting thoughts and experiences.  And, most nights, I fall asleep easily, trusting that the good of others, coupled with my own imperfect intentions, is enough to keep it all together.