Archives for category: Allegories

I woke during the night, several times. I managed to get enough rest, I think, in spite of that. It took a bit longer than usual to fully wake up. Still… it’s a new day, and I’m awake now, and working through the interlude between the first and second coffees of my morning. Pretty routine stuff.

How about that election, eh? Nothing more really needs to be said about that, I think, at least not by me.

At one point, while I was up during the wee hours, I stood in the darkness at the door to the deck, standing in the chill of an autumn night, door open to the smell of forest and creek, listening to peeping frogs and insects, and a nearby owl. I gazed up at the stars for rather a while, before I returned to bed, and to sleep. It was quite a lovely moment, well-spent. It required nothing of me beyond my presence, and it was “enough”. I felt somehow nourished by the autumn-scented stillness, standing there in the dark.

Another time, I woke, and contentedly wandered the house. No purpose to my quiet footsteps, aside from enjoying being wrapped in this pleasant little dwelling, feeling safe and loved, there in the darkness.

Another time, I just woke up to pee was all, and having done so returned to sleep quite easily.

I didn’t give myself any grief over my wakefulness. There wasn’t any stress associated with it. I simply woke, now and then, for some minutes, and returned to sleep afterward. No harm. No injury. No particular inconvenience. I may not have mentioned it at all, if I hadn’t happened to take a look at my blog to answer a question about a date in the past, out of curiosity, and noticed I have not written in some days. lol Sleep (or lack thereof) seems the sort of thing I’d write about, as much as anything. So, I did. 😀

I look at the time. I notice, again, that my coffee is gone. Time to begin again, I think, and why not start with another cup of coffee?

I slept poorly. I slept very little. I woke to the alarm, set for the latest acceptable time to wake before a work day. I made coffee…

…Pretty much all down hill from there, so far. “It is what it is.” I’m in pain. I’m slowed way down with fatigue. I’m cross… with pretty much the world, and everything in it. I’m easily frustrated. Easily angered.

…Did I mention the crossness?

I sat down to work with zero enthusiasm. It’s a very human experience. I’m glad the week is at its end; I’m over it, for sure.

Nothing much sounds any good right now. No solutions that I could consider seem worth considering. If it were solely my own choice, I’d log into a video game and kill monsters for a while, because honestly, that’s what I want to do more than anything else right now; kill monsters. Monster-slaying being generally discouraged “in real life” (most particularly considering by far the vast majority of the monsters most of us face will be in human form, and that would be murder, which is totally not allowed), video games are the near-at-hand proxy.

…I’ve got work…

Yeah. So. I’m in a shit mood, and I’m in pain, and I’d very much like to be left entirely alone right now. The world intrudes. Every minute I have to interact with another person, right now, is an irritant. I’d just fucking go back to bed, if that were an option. Hell, I don’t even want to be around me, right now. Not fun. Less than my ideal best self, for real, y’all.

Work is work. I remind myself I get paid for being a reasonable facsimile of my most professional “best self” for the purposes of completing the work day (and week). I eye my calendar with distaste. Meetings. With people. I look them over with care. Who am I having to meet with? Can it be rescheduled without consequences that ripple into the weeks ahead? Can the underlying need be met without having a meeting at all? Was I invited to meetings I don’t need to be part of? Are there optional meetings that I can simply opt out of without concern? I reschedule what I can. I opt out of those that I don’t need to be part of or have no obligations to. The day still looks unpleasantly full. I frown at my calendar. I frown at my coffee. I frown at the shade still drawn, obscuring the sky beyond the window.

I sip my cold coffee, and allow work to distract me from being pissed off about having to work “on such a completely shit day” (it isn’t, actually). I take a deep breath with each new interaction with a colleague, making a point of being “pleasantly neutral” as much as I can be, seeking to avoid reactions that become over-reactions. Bad moods can be “contagious”. I’d like to avoid sharing this around.

My head aches with fighting off tears; there is no room on my calendar for crying, today. My back aches from the general nuisances of aging, and my arthritis. My cold coffee is gone. Finished. Consumed. I’d like to have another, but don’t really want to interact with my Traveling Partner. (Yep, I’m in that shitty of a mood, this morning, and disinclined to “make shit worse”.) I’ve forgotten my water bottle, too. So… it’s just me and the work in front of me, in this quiet room, alone.

…Looks like I’ll just have to begin again…

This morning the work day seemed to start too early. To be fair, that’s partially a result of waking later than usual, and having an early morning soak before coffee. It’s just not my usual “order of operations” – but my back is pretty happy with me, and my pain feels well-managed. My coffee is just as satisfying as it would have been, had I chosen to have it first. :-)’

Coffee goes so well with an autumn morning!

Really first-rate self-care relies on me to select wisely from the available tools at hand – as is the case with most projects and work. lol 🙂

I sat down at my desk this morning and eyed my calendar suspiciously. Differences catching my attention without being obvious, and it takes me a moment to fully realize that a couple meetings I expected to slog through have simply disappeared from my day. Nice. I look over the other work planned for this week, and the weeks ahead as the year finishes. Good day for it. I consider my tools, and decide I’ll benefit from something that improves my focus. I put my headphones on, and begin again.

Today is turning out to be a less than pleasant day. I mean… it could be worse. I already voted, and it is not a headache to do that in Oregon. So… there’s that. Win? It’s something, at least. I make a point of being aware of the small win. In many other respects today is mostly fairly shitty.

…Well… a whole bunch of the moments are annoying, unpleasant, frustrating, ineffective uses of time, or wasted in a cascade of interruptions when I am struggling to concentrate. I slept badly. It’s been downhill from the moment I woke, although I’m certain that I had choices that could have been chosen rather differently, potentially with better outcomes.

This headache, though. This arthritis pain. Fatigue. Lack of focus. The sensation that I “can’t hear myself think”. A feeling of “falling behind”. The lack of sleep is just the sprinkles on the icing of a relatively crappy day.

…Crappy days are a thing. Everyone gets a few. I try not to take it personally. I try to refrain from allowing my shitty mood to become weaponized. I try not to allow myself to pass on the shitty experience to anyone else.

The work day is almost over. It really hasn’t been “personal”, at all. I’m tired and I’m in pain – that pretty reliably has significant potential to be rendered as “a shitty day”. I imagine shrugging it off, and find myself simultaneously amused and annoyed that the text editor in WordPress does not have a default menu of emoji for day-to-day use, and chuckle to myself when I realize how much I actually do use emoji instead of written word – even at work. Wow. How 21st century am I?

…I guess I’m at least 21st century enough to have a solid grasp of the practices involved in emotional wellness, resilience, and bouncing back from a shitty moment… I know how to begin again. 😉

I’m starting to feel genuinely settled in here at home. It’s lovely. 🙂

I woke this morning to darkness. That’s not really a surprise; the sun has been rising later in the morning, every morning, since the Summer Solstice. lol This morning I really noticed. Chilly, too. Chilly. Dark. It felt earlier than it was. I started the work day early, too. It’s Friday; I’ll enjoy being done earlier.

Fun fact; I started drinking coffee when I joined the Army, right out of high school. Not apropos of anything much, just happened to think about it, over my coffee, standing in the rain, on an autumn morning.

Life. Love. Work. Art. Coffee. It’s a Friday, and I’m fairly convinced that what I have in front of me, as a human, is “enough”. Feels good. I’m not bragging, by the way, I’m simply making a point of taking notice of my contentment, the way it has built over time, and the details that have turned out to truly “matter most” to me, individually, as a human being living this mortal life. I mean… I could want more… there’s more out there to be had, for sure…

…It can not be easy for my Traveling Partner, as we approach a major gifting holiday, that I feel such a deep and abiding sense of general contentment in life, right now… I mean… what do you give someone who literally “wants for nothing”? It’s not “a wealth thing”. I could want more expensive things, I suppose. I could seek more… of something.

…Books. Never too many books…

I catch myself wondering if years of my life characterized by striving, struggling, wanting, and envying what I did not have, were more about other things lacking in my life? That seems worth thinking over, and really reflecting on the nature of discontent, greed, seeking, and yearning. What makes us “want more”? Is it a universal given that it is about having less? Are the things we want and yearn for deeply truly connected to the things we’re missing in our lives, or are they proxies or substitutes that seem more easily within reach?

Thoughts over coffee. A morning that feels like enough.