These days

It seems sometimes like life is this set of gears, one set in another and so on, like mechanical ripples that move with, against, or because of each other. I can look back and it seems there was such a long stretch in there where life didn’t change. Years of predictable stability. But of course there was change. The larger wheel clicked slowly, but if I comb through my memories more finely, there are several different lifetimes in there. Smaller gears within of job roles and hours worked and the phases of growing children around which all other gears revolved. I was even a redhead for a while. But it was that larger wheel that gave the superficial illusion of peaceful sameness. I’m not even sure what that wheel is made of really. These four walls? The man sleeping in the other room? The tiny unscary stature of job changes? Or maybe just the size of my delusion. lol I don’t know, but that sucker’s been tromping the accelerator for five years now, and life feels a lot like that big spinning barrel that used to sit on the playground of Fairview Elementary. One of those not particularly safe things you don’t often see on a playground these days, but it was our favorite…as though we were drawn to the very idea of survival of the fittest. lol I was never the best at it, but I was drawn like the rest, waiting my turn to run inside that big wooden barrel like a hamster on a wheel until it spun so fast it would take me with it. I can’t say I love the sensation as much as I did then, but I can appreciate the exhilaration, the possibilities. Nothing looks or feels like it did five years ago. I was someone else then, and I wonder who I’ll be a year from now. There is more fear and less. More stress and less. Just days and days of more and less, but I was sitting here appreciating a whole bunch of more. It was a good day of more strength, more joy, aliveness. Days like this always bring more hope. ❤️