Started the day with nothing but hope, and not for something specific, but for life, for today, for the days to come. It is a new feeling in the sense that rain in a different city is new. You are, for all intents and purposes, familiar with the general idea—that water falls from the sky—but how it changes the city, how it changes the street, how it changes the people is different everywhere. That is, perhaps, how I would say this hope appears.
I have talked more in the last two days than I have in the past few months, and as I sat in a cafe and told a friend over the phone about the why and the what, it occurred to me that the reason I seek comfort inward that I even have the urge to do it is for a purpose, and that purpose is so I am alive and ready to talk to other people, that I am not staring into space, yawning and distracted, that I am interested, engaged and listening. We all rest, after all, to be active later. To rest for the sake of rest is as helpful as an umbrella inside a building. Once we have rested enough—like I have done for months, if not years—you must go out of your way to exhaustion, you must sprint to drudgery, you must seek days that begin in the AM and end there, too.
I feel invigorated by my fatigue—that I am already spent energises me. This is no irony. This is how it should be. There has been a dearth, a fallow of activity in my life, and now, it is here, and it is burgeoning. There is so much to do that I have not stopped to think about what I am supposed to be doing. Here, I am one of many. Here, I do not need convincing of my irrelevance in the larger world. Here, it is a placard shoved into my face, a megaphone screaming in my ears. This, too, is something all of us must experience.
I sit in a cafe and spend the entire morning working on things. Twenty other people sit at the other tables and do the same. I cannot describe how happy this makes me.