It’s raining out. The clouds have hung misty and coagulated all day – long gray bed sheets damp with sweat. It’s been fitting to my mood, which reeks of exhaustion and malcontent. As I sat under the florescent lights of my desk at work, I thought of how tiredness affects us, how it was affecting me. I woke up an hour early from a bad dream. At five o’ clock this morning, the distinct and vivid image of a man whom a friend had given a particularly frightening description of over dinner Saturday night, flashed in my mind and startled me awake. As my eyes adjusted, the gold lettering, Vizio, on my TV shined as a round, blurry orb. I shook my head and turned over. There was no reason to be scared. No one was there.
But by the time I started to doze off again it was time to get up and get ready for work. As I drove some thirty minutes later, I forced my eyes open. What was that about? It wasn’t even really a dream, just a flash of an image the very second before resurfacing from my subconscious. Maybe Satan was just trying to mess with me, or my subconscious really was just reacting to the way the story creeped me out. I shrugged it off, refusing to give it any real thought the rest of the day.
At work, my mood fluctuated. I had ups and downs. Customers were both annoying and welcomed. One of my transactions was rejected because I was a penny off on a deposit and I almost let a woman drive away without cashing her check. At 3:00, I was ready to go home. My humanness was embarrassing me, and I realized that no amount of coffee ever really made me feel anymore awake in these situations. I thought about going for a jog to get some exercise after I got off, but it’s been raining all day. Instead, I’m sitting on my couch, drinking tea, catching up on blogs, and thinking I really need to be working on my book.
The thing about rest is that it’s both a physical need and a mindset. Today, the lack of one negatively affected the other, causing me to feel zombie-like and robotic. When I’m physically tired, I switch into angsty teenager mode, which doesn’t seriously affect anyone around me, you’ll just find me looking brooding and stoic. The female Mr. Darcy.
And now that I say that, I realize just how true it is. Darcy is proud, and so incredibly reserved he can be downright awkward to the point he makes you uncomfortable, which is the effect I tend to have on people I don’t know very well, or who I’m just acquainted enough with to where our meetings feel strained and confusing. Unless I’m exhaustively familiar with you, chances are I’m calculating our conversation to the ten hundredth thousandth or whatever decimal point (I was never good at math) trying to make our conversation casual, but instead making us both feel like we have elephants sticking out of our butts we’re both trying really, really hard to pretend we don’t notice.
So, now that you’re familiar with my angsty teenager side, what I really struggle with is unearthing the still rock embedded inside me. Life I liken to a river, and our souls are the little pebbles bedded on the bottom. We’re supposed to be still, patient, letting the water carry us downstream when the time is right. But mostly I act like a fish – easy to frighten and prone to self-sabotage while my rock friend just lays against the wet dirt, trusting everything to work out. It’s not that I’m saying we should just lay there and let life happen to us. Okay, well, I guess to a certain extent that is what I’m saying. But perhaps it’s best for us to adopt a balance between rock and fish, where our ability to be still and our ability to go with the flow at the right times help us get through our days.
