Saturday, March 17, 2012

Journal 147 Stopped me in my tracks

http://www.thestar.com/iphone/news/article/1146928--shelagh-was-here-an-ordinary-magical-life

....this article did. Two friends separately, unknowingly, sent it to me.

I've been in a 'spring depression' (I am not kidding. I was emailing my friend L. yesterday about how I've started to hate spring, I know, I lost an hour's sleep this week, that's enough to make anyone crazy, but really--there are people EVERYWHERE on the streets, the weather men and women can't stop crowing about the record-breaking weather {somewhere inside myself I am trapped in March 2011, endless days of rain, that final pronouncement at the hospital of: no hope}).
So I remind myself, as my friend A. always does, to be gentle right now.

Reading this link was an amazing experience in doing just that.

It's Saturday morning (the sun is not, contrary to all reports, shining) and I'm sitting in the dim light coming through the window, in my pajamas; not at the dining room table, but on the couch. My car place called this morning at 8:30 am (I dropped my car off for routine service on the way home from work last night to avoid the early-am-Saturday thing) and they wanted to confirm what they were doing. I'm glad--to get things like this, car service, a blight on my existence like tax time and rrsp season, out of the way.
I checked my emails, my friend L. sent me her usual neatly-paragraphed summary of the last couple of hours (which for her, in her NY-city-life, contains ALOT of activities), and my sister sent me something about happy people (me, to her, in an email back: If being happy means I have to wake up at 6:30 am, like it, do yoga and eat granola, I'M OUT), but I digress. I AM happy, I know I am.  In every single aspect of life? No, of course not. But overall, it's good.

Reading this article, which was facebook-messaged to me by one friend (yes, I lower-cased facebook. It's a whole new world ovah heyah), and then posted on my facebook wall by another, was a reminder, to me, of a number of things:
One--respect for the sometimes brevity of life, and even if it is not that brief, respect for the tides, the twists, the bends in the road. It's nameless 'spring depressions', it's gaining-five-pounds-over-the-winter-ness, it's way of speeding up, warping the view, as you put another year under your belt, and another, and another.  Respect for its absolute finality in the no-turning-back-the-clock on every day in your life. As they say: no dress rehearsal.
Two--the commonalities of all of us, our connection to one another, the things we sometimes never so much as whisper to each other--fears about our future, doubts about our ability to find work, imaginations of tragedies and how we would cope--these things bind us all. Some of us more than others, and this, to me, explains how we bond with some (for me, a select, unique group, ever-intuiting things in me I didn't know I revealed)  and never quite click with multitudes of others--despite this, we remain--neighbours on this revolving-door planet, the point of the revolving door being that it never quite closes firmly shut.  You have to lock it closed, and even then, it has spaces, openings. You can't get into them all the time, but they're there. You see?
Three--it does seem to take less energy to be happy, it really does.  To be kind rather than rude. To be friendly and helpful rather than blustery and cold.  A good reminder for my too-reticent-Virgo soul sometimes: stop being so wrapped up in yourself, Carolyn.

I liked learning about Shelagh. It fed my never-ending appetite for reading about (and into) other people's lives, the way I love to read other good blogs. I want to know what Reagan does to help her over-loaded schedule become more manageable (because her way will be kookier and funnier than mine).  I want to see Julia's next photo and imagine the story-behind-the-story, because something tells me that sometimes, she's just scratching the surface, and it leaves things up to my imagination. I want to hear about Meg's rejection of a pass made by a married man. I want to cheer as she clumsily rebuffs him and is disturbed by this turn of events in her life.
So I sit on Saturday morning, one of my favourite times of the week, (please neighbours: stop slamming your doors), and look at the grey sky, and listen to the garbage truck of the cooking school that my apartment backs on to, and I, to coin a phrase from my favourite poem, 'praise the mutilated world'.

It's all we've got.

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