I owe you an apology. If you came here and found the blog inaccessible, that was me. I locked it on purpose, and I am sorry. But I want to explain why.
Remember how I mentioned in a previous post that for me, writing here is like praying? There was a prayer, or rather, a question I needed to release into the universe. One just for me and the universe. Not quite for the world. I needed it to exist here for a day or two. Just long enough to trust that something out there was listening. So I pulled down the curtain. And then I put it back up. That's all it was.
Honestly, it's not the question that terrifies me. It's the answer that I am not ready to hear. You know the kind of questions I mean. The ones that have been quietly living in the back of your chest for weeks, maybe months, curled up there like something small and warm that you are afraid to disturb. I want to know. And yet some part of me is absolutely certain that the asking will ruin everything. Or worse, the answer arrives, and it's completely devastating. It's nothing. Just me, once again, having built an entire world out of a silence that I filled with everything I wanted to be true. My brain, my gloriously, exhaustingly imaginative brain (Ughh!!!), has done this before. Taken something threadbare and ordinary and spun it into something luminous. Something that was never really there. So then there is only one outcome to it, which is the quiet embarrassment of discovering I have been the only author of the story all along!
What I know about myself, clearly and without apology, is this. I cannot live in the grey. I was built for the certain, the defined, the known. Black and white. Yes or no. Here or gone. Found or lost. Near or far. Real or imagined. The grey doesn't just frustrate me, it unsettles something foundational in me. I become someone who checks for signs in things that are not signs. Guess all I have to do now is to wait for the fog to resolve into something I can name.
Well, so now that's out of the way, I have more fun things to share.
Ah. Remember when I said I have two of my offspring trying out for the school team? Well, in all my worldly knowledge, I contemplated only two scenarios for the outcome. One, they both get selected. Two, they both don't get selected. So, guess the third option the universe had been quietly saving just for me? One did, and one did not! Now, as a parent, I struggled. Because how in the world could I celebrate the success of one without making the other feel like a failure? I suck at it. I am still trying my best, but I really, truly suck at it. I love them terribly, and I hate that I wasn't farsighted enough to let the younger one try out after a year, when the odds were friendlier.
Sigh! Every day is a new learning. Humbling and new!
Moving on to my much-anticipated away-from-home-for-work-solo-week. Honestly - drab!
Work was from 6AM to 7PM. I still had to be up at 4, not to hit the gym but to be ready to hit the road for work. I am in awe of people who work out when away from home base. That is a whole different level of savage. One, clearly, I wasn't. The closest I got to the gym last week was when I stepped out to grab an early morning cuppa starbucks, right beside the gym in the hotel lobby. Could have surely saved myself plenty of space in my carry-on if I hadn't packed all those extra workout clothes!
And then there was the flight home, which, if anything, only deepened my conviction that I am not meant to be airborne. The landing was nothing short of catastrophic. I remember gripping the armrest, eyes shut, absolutely certain I was moments away from a very unplanned, very personal introduction to the divine.
But while there, I did still manage to get a stroll by the riverwalk in Chicago. It has always been my favorite thing to do, and like all the other times, I loved it much this time too! Chicago always makes me feel loved. Some places hold you the same way every time, as if they have been keeping a version of you safe there, waiting for you to come back and collect it. I dream of the day I move there and call it home.
For now, I reached home, tired and exhausted, ready to hit the ground running. Only pausing long enough to ask a question and say a prayer.
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