As the evening wound ’round to a relaxed finish yesterday, I contentedly contemplated the day to come. An early start in the office, a busy-but-productive day, a quiet evening tidying up here at home afterward… all dependent on a single assumption; I would wake up on time, and drive to work a bit early. Nothing amazing or weird, just a routine workday morning in that plan. All the snow that had fallen had even melted away from the roads and most of the walk ways. It had soften along the edges of the deck and begun to slump and fall. Vast muddy patches of ground with sparse forlorn grasses were revealed. Definitely warming up. The commute would be no challenge.
I woke a minute or two after 3 a.m. My bedroom was filled with light, a peculiar soft glow coming through window. I got up to check it out – had I, perhaps, overslept? Could it be past sunrise? Perhaps the moon was full? No, that’s not for days still. So… what then? I peered through the blinds, then squinted… then retrieved my glasses and put those on, and tried again. What the hell? More snow. Everything was white – snow-white. The illumination was simply all the ambient light reflect back off the snow. Funny that it woke me. Funnier still that I had no interest in staying awake, even though it was already almost 3:30 a.m. I went back to bed. I even slept.
I woke on time, feeling content and sure of myself. I already knew about the snow. I’d already adjusted my thinking in the few remaining minutes of wakefulness before returning to slumber. I got up. I barely dressed. Fuzzy spa socks. Soft jammies. I had coffee. I got to work. It was ridiculously early for that sort of thing, and I was hardly as awake as I generally am. Things like that are less relevant in the context of basic task processing of very familiar routine low-risk-of-failure sorts of things, so of course that’s where I started the day.
It was a productive day, in spite of all my routines and planning being entirely upended, even shattered, fragmented and thoroughly broken. More of that than not these days, and I say this knowing it isn’t actually ideal for me. I see it around me in small things I am less “on top of” than I expect to be. I still get plenty done, but subjectively I find it also very easy to really see what isn’t getting done, and needs to be. That’s something I can count on though, and an opportunity for a first-rate beginning. At some point.
It’s an interesting time to explore life with the woman in the mirror. She’s still got some rough edges, some things to work on, further to travel on this journey that is one human lifetime. I frown for a moment at my monitor as some relevant seeming point slips past my awareness too quickly to include.
I end this day, again thinking I will be in the office tomorrow…only, this evening I also look out into the sky, at the darkness of gathering clouds that mock my willingness to make assumptions at all. Haven’t I learned that one, yet? I laugh at myself in a knowing way. Still so human.
There’s time to begin again.
Evening Light 