Stability

There are evenings where I'm home, with no immediate plans, and nowhere to go. These are nights I relish. Outside my living room window, I watch cars travel a main downtown road in Madison, the traffic light dictating who goes and who stops, and smoke rises calmly from the factory smokestack nearby. An occasional pedestrian is bustling down the sidewalk, eager to reach their destination and warmth. Lights shine from every direction, trying to penetrate the pure darkness that comes with a cloudless night.

In these moments of peace, I take a step back from the minute to minute and just observe from a far. The world as we know it is moving, going this way and that. There's an order, a form of organized chaos, and it all works. Each car, and the one insane winter biker, is going somewhere different, to meet with others in some building or place, possibly one of the many whose lights I can see from my window.

It's helpful to remember this when most of my life is spent actively engaged in that everyday hustle. Sometimes I'm physically moving in an airplane, rental car, or playing volleyball. Other times I'm mentally moving onto the next 5 things I want to accomplish. Either way, this life feels like a squirming puppy I'm clumsily trying to keep in my lap. Although the puppy is wonderful and brings real happiness, sometimes it's just flat out exhausting to keep a handle on it.

I've often thought that due to my lifestyle, stability or a routine, was not something I could have. Recently, however, I've started to see that term as relative, and therefore attainable to me. It's weird, because my routine is so wildly different from anyone I knew in the life before this particular job. All the people I know, from every corner of every place, are doing something different, going different places, living the life they know best. It's like those cars outside my window, each going somewhere individually, but part of the bigger flow.

Today that thought gave me comfort, and reminded me to breathe, the deep kind of breath, not the kind that you just do to survive. The one thing that isn't quite as comforting is that due to my current lifestyle, I can't make the metaphorical puppy into a real puppy, so I'll just settle with the awesome, stable life that I have now.