Work.
Since April I've been commuting to the East Coast, the only contract job I could find in the little corner of the SAP consulting field I've carved out for myself. Airports, rental cars, hotel rooms, take out sushi week after week -- wash, repeat. Back home on Thursday night (if my flight isn't canceled), my favorite few minutes begin as I turn the corner onto my quiet little cul de sac, see my house straight ahead all lit up, walk in through my front door and see Paula's smiling face. I never knew how important a routine, daily kiss hello or goodbye was until it was impossible. Dorothy was right, there's no place like home.
Stress.
Meetings, bills, deadlines, red tape, paperwork. The same stuff everyone deals with, noteworthy only because this is my blog so I have a license to complain at will.
Politics.
The US Presidential Election is over a year away, and already the candidates are thrashing around the dogfighting ring of debate stages, school gymnasiums, and small town coffee shops with the CNN crew perched two booths down snarling and drooling in some sort of grotesque, macabre waltz of shock and awe, clawing at each other voraciously; whoever can tear the most flesh off his (or her) fellow opponents goes the spoils. The infotainment industry, hungry for blood shakes and rattles the cage in all of our living rooms, whipping us lemmings into a rage against anyone who thinks differently than we do.
The World.
Massive corporate conglomerates beg and entice us endlessly to buy more things, borrow more money, eat more garbage and take more allergy remedies. They coo sweetly from TV screens, computer web pages, car radios, billboards, magazines -- everywhere, every minute of every day. Religious fanatics who believe God personally instructs their every move preach intolerance towards anyone different than they are, plant bombs along roads to kill others, fly airplanes into buildings and wage war on evildoers.
It's time for me to stop. Take a step back. What does all this mean? What is the effect of all we're doing to ourselves? To each other? Does anything we do have any impact at all, or is that missing the point? In the grand scheme of the universe, of everything that was, is and will be -- we make hardly a difference, even the most powerful among us.
And maybe that's the point.
We're all here, together. It's one world. We are all human. Today, more than ever, we have the ability to do such wonderful things for each other, or such terrible harm. The dichotomy of those two halves of our modern existence is as fragile as a soap bubble. Most of us will live and die without making so much as a tiny ripple in the fabric of the universe; somehow, that's immensely comforting to me. I can't change the world, but I can change myself.
Maybe the first step is a step back.