I’ve been sleeping decently well for a couple days. In spite of that, I am still quite fatigued, and right on the edge of that human condition in which I might actually start acknowledging that I am indeed quite exhausted. It’s a thing that builds over time, and that I stubbornly, more often than not, pretend is not a thing until I just… can’t. The result? I wake each morning grateful to have slept well and deeply – and already explicitly excited about more sleep at the other of the day. I’m much less focused on any daytime successes or goals than savoring the moment I woke slowly this morning, and wondering how much more delicious that will be tomorrow, on a Saturday, with no alarm clock. Omg. So good.

I sip my coffee and pull my focus back to “now”. I encourage myself to engage the day ahead. To wake the fuck up completely. To ready myself for work, properly. lol I feel like I’m fighting a young child who doesn’t want to go to school. More coffee? Is that the answer? Well… it’s an answer. I’ll go with that.

Life is on the verge of a lot of changes. (Change is a constant. I giggle at the thought.) The wheel continues to turn, always. My anxiety about my own missteps, errors, and the everyday risk of poor decision-making competes for my attention with my general excitement about a future that isn’t here yet. No point being overly emotionally invested in any case; the future isn’t “real” in any particular sense. That forward look? It’s imagined. Part of my internal narrative. Prone – very much so – to conflation, to exaggeration, to thinking errors, to poor assumptions, and expectations not tied to reality, thinking about the future is more like reading fiction than anything else. Some of it is excellent, insightful, work – some of it is just story telling. I breathe. Sip my coffee. Let it go.

Life has been filled with change – and turmoil – and trauma – and tedium – and opportunity – and also love. My “hustle” isn’t the same hustle as yours, but we’ve all gotta hustle, right? I smile at the open manuscript on my laptop. Where will I take this journey? I give silent props to my writer friends. There is a canvas on my easel; it too is a tale of past experiences. I smile a silent “thanks” to the friends who inspire me, and the artist friends who have work in progress staring back at them, too. I think about the trails I have already hiked, sitting here wearing boots worn down lovely through three re-sole-ings. I think about gardens I have grown. Pictures I have taken. Lovers I have loved. I sip my coffee and let those things simply be what they were, and what they now are; memories. I let that go, too. I don’t find my future living in my past, generally. 🙂

The wheel keeps turning. Change is. The next moment will be here when it arrives, and it will be as “now” as all the others. Impermanence.

I finish my coffee as I realize I am “pruning my dreams” as I sift through my thoughts; some dreams need to be let go, too, not due to any inherent flaw with the dreams themselves, but rather because they skipped over the part about having a shot at ever realistically being part of the present, at all, and have gone from the future directly to the past, unnoticed, unfulfilled, unrealistic from the vantage point of “now”. Why isn’t that more poignant? It feels so… practical.

I’ll raise my now empty coffee cup in a vague gesture of salute to life, on my way to the kitchen… it’s time to begin again. 🙂