Being strong, being sweet, being calm, being happy, being tuned in, flowing with life’s movements, staying centered, not allowing my temper to get the better of me, understanding others, full compassion, smiling -
these are not things that are easy for me this month.
Yesterday nothing went right. This itself is a flawed statement, because things went exactly right, went the only way they could have gone on this particular day in my particular life. But they didn’t go the way I wanted them to go, and there’s the rub – there’s the place where I depart from the allowing the universe to be what it is, and trusting.
A few of the people I work with directly are sick, and a few more walking around are too. (According to the internet, more than half the people whose blogs and comics I read are sick, which makes me wonder if there’s some geek-targeted illness floating around. Some of it is related to the sicknesses spread around at PAX this year, but some of it isn’t.) In any case, I had forgotten that working in a larger pool of people means it’s more likely that a strain of cold will spread around and around, and I am stuck drinking echinacea tea and hoping hard and sleeping for eight full hours for an awful lot of days in a row. I haven’t been sick in over a year (!), so as time passes it becomes ever more likely that something will catch me off guard. This stresses me out.
Nothing went right at work, in general. For instance, in the afternoon I picked five files up to work on, and one after another, every one of the five had something weird that necessitated me asking my trainer and (sick) team lead what to do about it. I worked on another file all morning, thought I had it right, passed it off for a look-see, and found that I’d fucked it up anyway. I made not one but two fatal errors on a filing yesterday afternoon that I had to pay for today. I ended up working late, and calendaring problems mean that tomorrow will likely be troublesome too.
Plus, the background check department has discovered that my alma mater has no record of me. I called the college this morning, and I guess the incompetent registrar was out by the time I called, because they had me in the computer as expected. I still have to fax over a copy of my diploma. Which incidentally is entirely in Latin – even the name of the college has been Latinified – and it looks pretty darn fake, so I don’t know if even that will satisfy them.
On the drive home I turned into an aggressive yelling weaving maniac. No one was going fast enough for me; everyone was in my way. This is childish and absurd and I can’t believe I wasted energy on it. But I wanted to get home, because I left work late, and I had all these things I wanted to do.
When I got home, I had planned to put a load of laundry in, do preliminary steps for making dinner, and do at least an hour of yoga. But I was tired and the laundry took longer than I thought and so I decided to just leave it to BF to make dinner when he got home. I was only halfway through the DVD routine I was doing (Shiva Rea) when BF did get home, and I came down and told him what I wanted him to do. But by the time I went back upstairs my focus was broken, and then BF came up to show me what happened to the noodles, and it was 7:15 and I didn’t know why he was footling around with the noodles when he needed to get going on making the rest of dinner, and I gave up on the yoga and came down to help him with dinner, being quite short with him when I got there.
“Are you angry?” he asked, as I was snapping snow peas.
“I’m not in a very good mood,” I said. “I’m sorry I’m taking it out on you.”
“Me too,” he said.
Ow.
So I mumbled through the rest of the prep and through eating dinner – I didn’t really taste it – and then I did the dishes and escaped upstairs. I wanted to be alone, rather than look at him and hear in my head how impatient I’d been with him. We made it up later, but I still felt as if I’d fucked up something deep and important.
What I fucked up was just that day, the eighteen hours I’d been given to be awake and alive that day. I’d gone about everything in the wrong way, trying to bend it to my will instead of relaxing and letting things settle out as they would. The mistakes at work didn’t matter (I’d fix them), the traffic didn’t matter (I’d get home anyway), making dinner didn’t matter (it’d still be nourishing, no matter when we ate it). But I got wrapped around whether these things were going to my specifications and I made myself miserable and dangerous to be around.
There’s this thing that’s been on my mind for the past several days, about the girl who comes in to work on Friday afternoons for a few hours. In theory I am replacing her, as she has left the firm to go to law school full-time, but she is also the daughter of one of the partners, and has worked at the firm on and off since her summers in college. So her comings and goings are a bit more flexible than the rest of us. In some areas she knows more about our systems than the team lead of the department, so her short Friday afternoon working is to train me, help out with any issues or questions, and help us catch up on any work that’s backed up.
She’s a perfectly nice person, and I know this, but last Friday I found myself with uncontrollable resentment towards her. She’s younger than me. She dresses expensively. She spent a year in Japan teaching English after college, where she also went abroad. She’s going to law school full-time. Basically, when I look at her I see a rich lawyer’s daughter, doing all the things I didn’t get to do when I was a bit younger, either because my parents limited me or because I was so stupid/unlucky after college.
She’s also not at all shy about telling me what I’m doing wrong, which is of course her job, but it’s rather grating the way she does it. She’s very specific about things that both my full-time trainers have told me don’t really matter, or on things they have failed to train me on at all. Again, none of this is stuff that should produce the kind of bile I felt on Friday afternoon, or make me feel as low and invisible and useless as I did. The flaw is with me, and my inability to see her as just another human being with her own set of challenges (and to recall that compared to a person who had to work her way through college, I had it easy). I dread this Friday, and seeing her again.
All of this has made me feel as if the progress I’ve made towards becoming calmer and better in the last eighteen months has collapsed, and I’ve become the same impatient, emotional, overreacting idiot I was before yoga entered my life. I realize that I’m having a hard time adjusting to the long commute, and the chunk it’s taken out of my life, but I didn’t think it’d be getting worse in the third week of it, rather than better.
Another way in which I’m childish. BF has been doing a longer commute than this for over three years, and even before that he did a similar commute from his parents’ house for another year or two (don’t remember exactly how long). Three weeks and I’m whining like a dog.
But this is one of those periods of my life when the real world and its challenges is clashing with the luminous interconnected world I’ve been trying to place on top, like animation cels overlapping. It’s all coming out a jumble right now and I can’t make sense of it and it’s exasperating me. I know I can’t live in a cave in order to find peace, and that in this world at this time the peace comes from within. That kind of meditation is actually more of a challenge than living the renunciate life, and I’m feeling every inch of it right now.
Finding order in the chaos, however the chaos shouts and screams and tears at its hair, is how you’re supposed to make it work, I think. But I just can’t see any straight lines and I want to sit in the corner and cry until it all makes sense again.
