Days 8 & 9

Day 9 isn't over yet; I still have yoga to go to tonight. And of course, dear old Day 8 has come and gone. I'm watching more snow coming down just outside the dining room window where I'm sitting to write this, and I'm feeling very content and at peace. I got back from the high of this weekend in a great mood, and was surprised on Tuesday to be slammed with trepidition. It felt like things were slowing down; I didn't have any more meeting scheduled, I was unsure of myself, I didn't really know again what I was doing.

What if they revived the debtor's prison and I ended up dying in there, cold and alone?

Yesterday I waited and waited for people to respond to emails and phone calls, requesting the pleasure of their company and good ideas over a cup of coffee. After waking up late and having bizarre nightmares, I went out on walks and went to the YMCA, where I now have a membership, to do some yoga. I was in a major funk because of some correspondence I'd had with a dear friend. Yoga didn't feel good to me, because it was different than the teacher I usually have, which is that dear friend, who I no longer live a short distance from. The instructor seemed like she had it scripted everything she had to say, and I got more of a physical workout than the body and mental "ahhh" and opening that I do yoga for. Nobody emailed me back or called me. I spent the day fretting over how to respond to my friend and over my future, which seemed to be darkening before my melodramatic, impatient eyes.

I went to a movie/lecture called "How to Eat Local in Michigan in the Winter" at the Wealthy Street Theatre. This lifted my spirits a little. I'm happy to be falling into the local food scene here more and more, and realized last night that food might be a sustaining issue for me for life. Maybe. In any case, I always feel drawn to it.

This morning I woke up with TM instead of sleeping late and made him breakfast and some coffee in the French press, sweetened with whipping cream and maple syrup. I sat down and worked on a letter to my friend and when I finally finished, I closed it on my computer, looked outside at the big fat snowflakes, and went for a long walk. I love living in a city with a big river. I bought a newspaper and then stood on one of the bridges, listening to the echo of the cars reverberate underneath the bridge and bounce down to the streaming yellow chunks of ice.

When I got home, I got on the phone and hashed out some points of business, but more importantly, I solidified the start of a new friendship. If I was feeling refreshed before, this totally puffed the wind back into my sails. I laughed to myself at the name of a person I'm supposed to interview next week for a small piece of contract work: it's the same person I received a voicemail about from one of my previous contacts, telling me I should call her to talk about Grand Rapids and what I'm doing here! I called her up, and we laughed together and set up a time for next week for breakfast, an interview for the story I'll be writing, and a conversation about community and happenings.

Then it was time for the most important part of the day: shoveling. I got outside and worked up such a sweat that I ended up taking my jacket off! I shoveled and shoveled and my arms were aching and my head was in tune with just the motions of what I was doing, turning over the events of the last few days almost as a sidenote that I wasn't paying much attention to. I watched some fellow shovelers chatting with one another, and then one of the neighbors came over with his little daughter and introduced himself, and we talked for a while. After he left, I leaned on my shovel for a bit of a break and thought to myself, what a great life I'm living right now. What an absolutely great life.

Before this stretch of gainful unemployment, I have always fit my life around my job or my schoolwork. That is over now. My job is going to have to fit my life from now on. I realized I haven't been bored once. Every day I'm busy and contemplative and meeting people and exercising almost without thinking and writing. Every day I feel nourished and even when anxious, at peace. Every day I am taken care of, and every day something good happens, and every day I feel I've been productive and have taken steps to live my life in a way that's more meaningful. Why would I ever want to work at a job I hated ever again, when life is this good?

And then I came in and made chocolate chip cookies.