The Circle of Life

Once again, I find myself here:

 

This time there's no bitterness; just honest sadness and if-only. Sometimes, without provocation, life kicks you in the guts and runs away laughing.

 

The last several times I was here, I eventually patched myself together again and got back out into the world.

 

The world has this guy:

I know he was out in the world last time...because he asked me out.
We're obviously soul mates.

This time, I've stared at a wall absently for a few weeks and I'm just not sure what comes next.

Suffice it to say that if I ever write another dating profile (in the distant and unthinkable future), I'm starting it off with

   "im also a leo so i got some freak in me so was up..." 



176 Feet Per Second

I went skydiving this weekend! Ergo, this post should be about an adrenaline rush.
But it's not.

Instead, it's about a little airport in a field near Interstate-55. Next to a pothole-scarred dirt road, there's a hangar with its floor covered in carpet scraps. Inside that hangar the feeling in the place is almost like a commune: bright colors, an occasional cigarette, worn-in furniture, people who aren't family but seem to know everything about each other. It's a group with inside jokes to tell and an endless supply of high-fives to give out. It's a group that makes newcomers feel comfortable and strangers feel a little less strange.

 

What's striking, though, is that they're a group of people who have mastered the art of being relentlessly meticulous while managing to seem completely carefree. Somehow in the background of all that fun (or actually in the foreground, so blatantly right-in-front-of-you that you miss it if you're not paying attention), they are laying out every line, inspecting every inch of rigging, and folding every bit of fabric perfectly. They are thinking about how my life and their lives depend on it. That's a heavy job. And they're making it look easy.


 

In my day-to-day work at the hospital, it's so easy to get swallowed into the noise of other people's pain and fear compounded by my own doubt. Sometimes, I feel absent. The joy and wonder get lost because of the intensity of what's at stake.

 

But here in the hangar, with its beat-up old couch and its barbecue grill in the corner and its rack of jumpsuits in every cornea-searing shade of neon known to man, the joy and wonder are practically palpable because of the intensity of what's at stake.

It's hard to explain, but somehow all of that accounts for why, when I stepped out of an airplane two miles above the earth and hurtled into free-fall (with a tandem instructor strapped to my back doing all the actual work), I didn't feel any fear. Instead of a rush of nervous adrenaline, it felt like a tingling wave of total calm. I felt alive, but not in the wild uncontrollable way that acts as the flipside of the coin stamped "facing death."

I felt present.

After all that effort...

I went on a float trip last weekend down the Meramec River. We got caught in a pouring rainstorm at the outset of the trip, and spent about an hour huddling inside the raft-rental shed waiting for the rain to stop. Fortunately, the clouds eventually cleared up, the sun came out, and it was the perfect day to dawdle along a river in central Missouri.

Ironically, that watch I fixed last week fell off in the water while I was swimming through a strong current to rescue an escaped flip-flop sandal. So now, after all that effort to stitch it back together, the watch is somewhere in the silt along the river bottom. At least it's down there with an intact wristband.

Confessions of the Frugal Kind

My watch broke. Or, more specifically, the poly-plastic wristband of my watch broke. The timekeeping part of the watch was still perfectly fine and dandy.

Since that watch cost at least $8 whole dollars, I wasn't going down without a fight. There was only one possible solution.

I sewed the watchband back together.  I felt like the scrimpiest saver of a cheapskate. I felt a little like a pioneer darning socks. But in the end the thought of eight bucks won out, and now it's all back in working order again.