the view from my office

This year I will notice the sun. My life is enshrouded in office dullness. I want nothing more than light — the shine and vitamin D of the sun.

In my sadness, in my busyness, I rush by, failing to notice the sun, the sky, the birds, the laughter, the people.

The sun is now setting; the day is gone. I noticed in a meeting earlier today how everyone ducked their head into their laptops as if their computer screens were a shield, protecting them from what? Each other? Very few of us made eye contact.

New Year’s Resolution: I will notice the color of people’s eyes.

I will be a people person, not a screen person. I will listen more deeply.

I often have something to say; I open my mouth quite easily. There is hardly a topic that you can mention that I don’t know one fact or have one statistic about. I have an opinion on everything.

I do not know everything. There is wisdom in not knowing, in noticing. There is quiet. There can be lulls in conversations. Usually when there’s a void, I tend to jump in. I hate the chasm. Like in a Harry Potter movie, a wide open space must be jumped across. But what if the wide open space simply was a place to meander, to linger.

I am so tired of being the engine that makes every little thing go. “I can’t do it, I can’t do,” I sobbed the other night when I couldn’t sleep. Yes, literally sobbed. The worries of my day multiplied, work worries times Chris’s decline times the kids growing up.

But what if I just stood at the side of the chasm and did nothing? I could stand there like a spelunker at the side of a cave. I have loved a mystery, an adventure. What if — ah, this is good — I saw my life as a quest?

I saw myself as going after something — I am Dorothy in the land of Oz, trying to find her way home.

I open to the chasm. I walk the yellow brick road. I am an adventurer at a crossroads. I am looking this way and that. I am listening for clues. For the sound of a waterfall or the barking of my dog ToTo.

I am not alone, yet I must make my quest alone. And when I come out the other side of the chasm, I can look back and think, I have come far, I have crossed that. Or maybe I’ll just fall into the fiery pit and be burnt to a crisp. That, too, happens in an adventure story.

But to see life as a journey, as a quest, this is the path to follow.