Sometimes in the cool blush of morning I find myself unwilling to surrender the bliss of sleep. Even after I have struggled from the cocoon of my duvet and felt the rough pull of the carpet on my feet my mind lingers regretting its lost comfort. This in itself is not unusual, especially with the winter blues hanging overhead - the darkness of day followed by the darkness of night that marks our winter season here in the midwest. Everyday begins and ends in darkness, not a bright way to live, but at least its shadows are short lived and I am lucky enough to have an office with a wall of windows. In this way I am asured that daylight, however brief has not left me. It is just more fleeting. Nevertheless, I find that I have changed this season.
I have of late developed a staggeringly different way of approaching the day. Gone is the final grunt of acceptance which is followed by the abrupt departure from the covers and a head long dash into the day. Instead, I find I am lingering. I am allowing myself a cup of coffee (sometimes two) at the house. I linger over the book from the night before, pressing the envelope on the time I have to the point where I end up racing out the door to make my earliest appointment. Or on more than one occasion end up taking the planned conference call from home as I am too late to make it to the office. It is as if time is just drifting around me - or rather I am drifting through time.
There are moments when I feel ruffled by this change, but for the most part it seems more like I am floating along with the rest of the flotsam and jetsom in my life, just bobbing in the waves as they take me the next port of call. Did I mention that I have indeed many ports of call? I travel. I travel a lot. I just returned from journey that took me from Florida, to Tennessee and back home arriving around 11:30 pm - only to leave the following morning in time to hit the highway at top speed (roughly within the limits of the law) for meetings in Chicago. I leave again after only 5 days on the ground for a trip that will take me to South Carolina and three different cities there, back home for two days, then off to Missouri, back into Illinois, home for a brief blip then off to DC and into Montana to round out the month. I am indeed just bobbing in the current of my life. And I think somewhere along the way - as this travel whirlwind has increased its pace, I have somehow decreased my internal pace - creating this oddly almost balanced ecosystem in which I exist.
I wonder sometimes, how much longer can I manage the pace - and then I wonder if I could manage without it?
We have learned to live moving constantly. We have created devices that allow us to communicate in nano-seconds, to be as close to literally as possible in multiple places as once. Would we know how to go back to something simpler? Are we fundamentally capabable of only small capsules of time spent suspended? Like my morning cups of coffee over the books I am scrambling to finish. Are these leisure moments which I scrum into my calendar really all I can handle? Would a week of open time crush me? Would I enjoy dropping down the pace?
When they say that retirement killed someone, is this what they mean? That the blood pressure dropped so low that they just ceased to be? Somehow that actually makes sense to me. And at the same time, it is over-poweringly sad to believe it could be true.
Just thinking out loud - How about you?
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