Three Months

I'm a few days late. Six of them.

On the 20th, I was dealing with a dying laptop and too much work stress. I also was counting the days until I could take a few days off from work. I am now taking some days off from work. I haven't relaxed into it yet. I'm in the between space. 

People still are sending me emails. Other people are writing articles about "quiet quitting."  There are conversations on comment threads about what used to be called "working to rule." I'd never heard of that either. I'm feeling a bit irked about the idea of shaming people for daring to have a life outside of work, for attending to their children, for cooking and eating a nice meal, for relaxing into a quiet evening with a good book. For drawing a line between work and life, and creating a balance between the two. 

I'm reminded of the conversations I'm seeing around the student loan forgiveness that is in the news these days. I'm stunned that people are freaking out about this, while something like tax cuts to the already wealthy and to corporations that are bringing in record profits go unremarked and seem to create no outrage or talk of fairness. We used to value things like education and family time. Now it seems like both are becoming more and more impossible.

Sometimes I look at the world and wonder how things went sideways. I wonder at greed that leads people to hoard and to deny others food, shelter, dignity.

It's a strange, strange world.

I miss the old days. 

I won't call them good, because they might not have been good for everyone. But I wonder if more people had it better then. People certainly seemed kinder and more community-minded.

How strange it is that I've found myself pondering these things in the space between work and some time for myself. As I continue to dwell in a space of grief. The big grief brings little griefs to light. 

I have a refrigerator full of food but I didn't feel like cooking today. Didn't feel like cutting up fruit and cheese, or like opening up a container of cold meat or a can of tuna. So I ordered pizza for dinner. Tomorrow I'm going to soak in a sensory deprivation chamber and hope all that ails me will stay in the water and drift away, transfigured by 4000 pounds of Epsom salts. Maybe I will feel a little bit renewed, or will have taken a step on the path.

Creating Space: Three Months of Showing Up for What's Showing Up is a daily writing practice. Turns out that a lot of this writing explores the landscape of grief. My mother died shortly before I began this writing, and this is what I'm thinking about most of the time these days.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.