What Matters

Okay, today I woke up at 3:51, fuzzy from the drugs I took to sleep well last night (alka seltzer cold and such) and wanting nothing more than to curl up in the guest bed of my parents house and go back to sleep. I'd gone home to spend out my confinement with family and pets, and had actually done a fairly decent job at healing myself, or being healed by caring, equally sick parents.

I digress. At that ungodly hour I awoke, and withing ten minutes was on the road for Lehi, where I needed to be to work no later than 7:30. I drove, on the verge of sleep most of the way until the beautiful dawn woke me to a sense of wonder and excitement for this day. Made it to Outback at 7:30 on the dot, got to work, and stayed working until 8 PM tonight. That's 12.5 hours of work, for those who need the math help, after a very early uprisal, and it has left me somewhat groggy and spacey. That and the medicine I took tonight which is putting me to sleep as I type.

All of this is an apology for this post, and how it won't be anything magnanimous. But that's what you're used to, right?

All I wanted to say tonight is:

1). I love Mumford and Sons. Okay, I've only actually heard two songs, but I heard them both on the radio, independently, and wrote down the words to look up who it was because I thoroughly enjoyed them. Then I saw them on a recording of the grammy's, and literally fell in love. I will get more of their music soon, and for the time being I will have all I need to keep me going when life gets tough.

2). I drove home from the field tonight with a coworker who is coming in early because his brother's best friend was found dead this morning. He had been out...ice skating? doing something on a frozen lake in Minnesota when he was hit by a car also out on the ice. The car left him for dead though, and his body was found by snowmobilers the next morning. The staff was sort of in shock as he told me about it, about how devastated his brother would be, about what a great guy this had been and how tragic it was.

It made me think. Death always does. Maybe because it's typically very detached from me, its people i sort of know, or someone I just hear about. I've never lost anyone really really close to me. I can only imagine that grief. But what I imagine makes me really question my life, question my priorities, question my plans, question my fears, and wonder what I can do more. How I can live more, how I can make more of myself, how I can fill the time to lessen regrets when I have no more time here. Because it could have been me, just as much as him. It could always be me. Or you. I don't want to live in fear of dying, but i really don't want to live with fear of living. And I do. Every day of my life.

So it got me thinking, that's all. The staff at first decided he'd stay out in the field, but as it started to sink in what had happened, he decided he needed to come in. One of the therapists summed it up nicely, saying that it's hard to stay and deal with the group's petty problems and fights and shirkings of duty, and see those things as important, when your perspective has shifted like that, when those things really become the petty disagreements that they are, and something so serious and real looms up ahead of you. I took some license with that description, but there it is.

So what petty things are getting in my way? What disagreements, poison everything to me, so i think they actually matter in the grand scheme of things? What do I let rule my life instead of overcoming to create the life I want? How do I create the life I want?

Interesting. That's all. It was an interesting night. Day. minute. Hour. they're all one, really.