The work emails were still coming at 8 but not with the volume that accompanied the 5 PM hour upon which our cross country seder was supposed to begin.
Truth is I wasn’t in any mood for the seder and was irritated about trying to make an accommodation I knew in advance wasn’t going to work for me.
Couldn’t stop the work stuff that early and couldn’t push the seder back so I got next to nothing out of it which set me off and may or may not be why someone who looks like me had a couple of glasses.
It made me think about dad because he would have understood the rock and the hard place and said to do as I did, of this I have no doubt.
And it reminded me that even though it sometimes feels like he has been gone for quite some time this is only the second Pesach he hasn’t been around for.
Throw that into the mix along with everything else and it sent me wandering into the desert of my own mind.
I don’t think I have said more than a dozen words for the last several hours.
It Is Unsettling
The younger Mr. Wilner says when I get this quiet it is unsettling and I suppose I can understand that, but this quiet is very familiar to me.
I have seen and experienced it with dad and my grandfather in varying degrees. There comes a time when there is nothing to say and silence is my voice.
The younger Mr. Wilner says it is strange because I can be so silly and talkative but I remind him I am not always so.
There are times when I have to be serious and when you spend the day doing what I had to do today you are sometimes spent.
Given the current situation I am focused on doing all I can to make sure my professional position remains as secure as I can make it and if that requires a different compromise than I want, well I am going to default on protecting income.
Provided it doesn’t compromise other values in a way I can’t live with and given the experience of 2008 you can bet I am going to fight like hell not to end up there again.
It was a perfect storm in some ways today. Had I been given time to decompress and unwind a bit I would have been more engaged and engaging, but that is not what happened.
So to a certain extent my quiet also came from trying not to snap at people who didn’t deserve my ire.
Hopefully they got something out of Zoom time even if I didn’t. I can be good with that. I did what I had to do as best I could.
Strange Coincidence?
I was at a conference in the South this past January that was attended by around 3,000 people.
It sticks out in my mind now because a significant number of people got sick after attending it. More than a few said this knocked them on their butts and that they had never experienced anything like it.
Some talk about the lingering cough, loss of certain senses and doctors who said they had some nasty virus.
Several of us have wondered if was Covid-19 or if that is a reach. The timing would be about right and some of the attendees came from places which make it even more conceivable.
Might not be accurate though, without tests or something we can use to verify and certify suspicion it is speculation and could just as easily be chalked up as a bad flu.
But I remember some of the calls and conversations afterwards where people asked if I got sick and I said no.
My digestive system might be wonky, but in general I don’t get slowed down by much. Get a cold once 0r twice a year…if that.
Running With The Moon
Got a few things I need that I haven’t been able to get delivered and I play around with going to get them.
Got a few things chafing my hide and I play around with making calls or sending letters to address them.
Got a few things rubbing me raw in all the wrong places so I want to go outside and run with the moon.
Spam in my email says my soulmate is out looking for me. I look at the email and mutter something about not being hard to find.
Stare at the work phone and see a situation forming like a storm on coming over the horizon and start considering how to move chess pieces around the board.
Got to handle that before it gets to be too damn big to manage and am confident about my ability to do so but wonder about a few things because we’re not dealing with the normal circumstances and situations.
What you would normally expect may not play out as such and no one has ever seen such things.
Funnel clouds might form unexpectedly and you never do know if they’ll touch ground and what happens if they do. Will they zig and zag or follow straight lines?
Beats me.
Look out the window on a different situation and ask myself if I wait to get the call I expect or wonder if I make the call.
Do I reach out and spell everything out in detail? Will that advance or slow things?
Is it better to wait and see or does that mean I lose the ability to manage the situation?
Will that leave me in a place where the current guides everything so that instead of guiding the ship into harbor I risk it slamming into the rocks?
Or worse yet, will it be lead out to sea where it may wander endlessly searching for signs of shore?
There are real questions and a serious ache.
