Up and Down

In the morning these days, walking up the three flights of stairs from the underground parking to my work is exhausting. My getting quite out of shape in the past year certainly has something to do with it, but even more than the physical tiredness is the encompassing psychic fatigue I’ve been experiencing lately. The utterly Sisyphean nature of this daily ritual of walking up the stairs in the morning, walking down the stairs in the evening, doesn’t fail to escape or amaze me.

The daily and weekly work life leads little time to think, and not having that mental space to ruminate has slowly worn me down. I just wish I had some time to think things through and to clear my head. Though truth be told, my free time has not been spent particularly productively lately.

Aren’t life-changing events supposed to be periods of self-reflection and epiphanic course corrections? But yet, I see myself still working through the same routine, still holding on to so many little things and habits that entrench my status quo way of life, comfortable and meaningless. I want to brush everything aside, but I don’t. It feels like an important lesson was revealed, recited, and then promptly forgotten.

But what is the lesson that I was supposed to have learned? If it’s to see joy in everything, then I was doomed to fail it. A substrate of hope, perhaps. Taking the good with the bad, but also the bad with the good.

In the end, life is simply what it is. Perhaps with some Herculean mindfulness we can change our perception of what we see. But it is tough many days to pull myself by the existential bootstraps, to repeat the mantra that “this is water”. Sometimes, I want to scream, but I have no air. Time flows forever forward.