whimpering inertia

It started raining towards the last stretch of my drive to work. Because I don't have air conditioning I keep the windows open all the time, rain or not. I put my hand out to feel it and the rain was like little flecks of ice hitting my skin, so cold!

I want to feel free like I did as a child in Georgia. It was so easy to play. How is it so hard now? Such different priorities. I lived to be outside, on my bike, in the woods, at the pool... The court in front of my house flooded every time it rained, it was an impromptu pool, opaque and murky- but we didn't care, it became a part of our play ground. We tried to ride our bikes through it, sometimes that worked, when it wasn't too deep- when it was, the bike suddenly stopped and the rider got propelled into the pool.

So I stayed up too late last night and woke up too early... I decided to sleep on the deck, which meant waking up when the sun rises. I always forget about the bloody air conditioning kicking on and off. I'm trying to fend off a headache without pills... Doomed! It's Sarah B's birthday tonight and I might not last long... it's crossing my mind to cancel and go to bed. What a crazy day! Painting the shed, driving from baltimore to annapolis to bowie to get sarah to a doctors appt... All in a large heat oozing vehicle with no air conditioning. I am thoroughly spent. I want to whimper and cry. I kept getting all the people applying for new cards before my break- I think of it as karmic return. As I saw each face approaching me with that telltale piece of paper I literally hunched over and whimpered. Strange thing is people really don't notice, I'm actually grateful for it. I have so often narrowly avoided doing new card applications, of course that would come for pay back when I'm desperate to get off the floor and eat.

So my one thought today came from watching the second half of the goblet of fire. It was the line Dumbledor issued about "there comes a point when he have to choose between doing what is hard or merely easy." Shoot, that is a horrible paraphrase, but it still captures the gist if less than poetic. Also the scene when Harry is confronting Voldamort (just dawned on me that the second part of his name means death...) and his first inclination is to jump behind the gravestone then we see the transition on his face where he is literally deciding- no, I'm going to face this, face my fear... At first I felt the challenge in myself, doing what is hard instead of letting inertia win (a feeling my mom has been pondering lately, and a powerful force. Being an object at rest wanting more than anything to remain at rest. It takes so much friction to get a resting object back in to motion...). But then another thought came up, one that does from time to time. So many things in our world preach at us, it doesn't just happen in a church. Everyone likes to get up on a soap box and tell the world how to behave. That actually isn't the thought, but it is connected. We have movies, books, art, etc that have these grand stories and plots, characters struggling to be heroes, to choose the grand good over inertia, fear, what ever... And in the ones that aren't trying to be a reflection of life, that is usually accomplished. The irony for me is a world full of people telling and consuming the story of the hero while most of them are daily choosing the opposite. Inertia and fear rule their lives but we have this dichotomy where we want to go and watch the hero be bigger than us and then go on living small lives. How many people find the disparity jarring? Every now and then I have that moment of illumination and it all seems so surreal.