Sometimes life is easy, sometimes it’s hard. Tonight, I sit sweat-soaked, tired, worried, strained, tearful, confused, and honestly – just not happy to be away from home. Hotel rooms, many of them, have a certain… ‘quality’. Let’s be honest, more a ‘characteristic’ than a quality, perhaps? It is easy to become immersed in the dreary, the grim, the fatiguing, the sad, the low… I wonder how often someone has sat, morose and alone, in a hotel room and written great tragic poetry, gritty urban thrillers, or words of disconnection, loneliness, and pain? Probably a lot.
What it is, what it isn’t.
I’d rather not succumb to the dingy yellows and ochres of the decor, and hoping to provide some relief from the strangeness of the air, the windows are thrown open to breezes and the sounds of traffic. I am, nonetheless, very much alone. The sweat that poured off me so freely in the afternoon heat as I made my way to the hotel is now chilling me through the dampness of my shirt. My head aches. I was as efficient as I could will myself to be in the moment, purposeful, gentle, wasteful of neither time nor movement; there were other needs to meet than my own. Still, efficiency is only as useful as it is skillful, and my ankle throbs quietly reminding me that my ankle brace is still in my pack, from yesterday’s hike, forgotten in the joy of achievement and fun, and overlooked in my purposeful rush to pack and make a timely check-in to this solitary, rather cramped room peeking at the street below, through fluttering leaves. I like the view much more than the room.
The world waits outside this room, and the world has no stress over any concerns of mine at the moment. I’m hungry. The evening is pleasant. There is no need to succumb to sorrow and pain by an effort of will, and I realize that I’m hungry. The bottled water in the room is ‘courteously’ provided at a ludicrous mark up. There is a grocery store down the street, and in the frenzy of human beings handling human affairs I may find, too, a moment of kind contact, a brief connection, a reminder of all the good that is…
Do I take the red pill – or the blue pill? [cue Matrix theme, cut to clip of sexy people in shiny black clothes doing stuff in slow motion]
I will watch South Park tonight, and I’ll laugh – and in laughing is perspective, and healing, and a reminder that we’re all in this together, each having our own experience, each doing the best we know to do, mostly, when we can, generally, or at least…we’re probably trying, and god damn – all most of us want is to be heard, to feel visible, to know that the people who matter to us find that we matter as well.
Today is a good day to wonder ‘what can I learn from this’. Today is a good day to consider this woman I am, and who I want to be. Today is a good day to be the change I want to see in the world.
