A Breath of Fresh Air

Somehow, today got away from me…hence the post at just after the clock turns toward tomorrow.

Too many deadlines, too much stress for too many reasons…all adds up to that overwhelming feeling of suffocation. Again. I think I am not quite back on track with my promise to refocus and concentrate on taking care of my Self better.

This afternoon, I hit a pretty low place. I know why. See above plus add less real and good quality sleep in the last three weeks than probably one full night. These bouts of insomnia – for whatever reason – are most assuredly not good. Everything is worse when I am tired. (I am starting to understand why Kidzilla has awful tantrums when she is overtired. I totally get it.)

Anyway, after my bottom-out this afternoon, I talked in person/on phone/via text with three different people who helped get me get my head back on straight. I calmed down. I took a few deep breaths. I got back to work.

When I walked outside to head home this evening, I stopped dead in my tracks. It was a startlingly beautiful evening. I actually stopped and stood there, mouth open, looking around. It was warm. People were outside enjoying the evening. There was a delightful breeze teasing the last of autumn’s palette on the trees. At this time of year, you would expect to walk outside on an evening and feel the first hint of the frosty winter chill creeping down your collar. Not so tonight. The breeze carried the scent and smell of spring. I experienced – quite literally – a breath of fresh air.

Perhaps it is the English major or the secret poet in me, but this sweet smelling breath did not go unnoticed or unappreciated. For me, tonight, it carried a hint of spring’s promise. It carried hope.

As I threw my sweater over my arm and headed to my car, I felt a lightness beneath my feet and in my heart. Perhaps I lingered just a little bit longer in the evening breeze than I would have before getting into the car. And maybe I did open the moon roof all the way so that I could continue to take that hope into my lungs and look at the sky as I made my way home.

The car radio was conveniently tuned to one of those “spa music” channels and the overall effect was exactly what this Soul needed tonight. I was reminded what an old classmate told me once when we were taking a British Romanticism course in college…she said I was a closet Romantic.  “I knew it!” she said after I had described a walk around my apartment complex in the snow at night. (Think Emerson’s Nature here… “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.”) I laughed it off at the time, but tonight I thought of her and of that evening and of all the moments since then when the beauty and power of the world around me has provided solace. Not all of those moments have been so startling; some are quite subtle. But they are all powerful nonetheless.

And so maybe it is time to open the door and let that breath of fresh air in once again – quite literally, but also in the most figurative sense. Maybe it is time to let it wash over me and heal the burdens I carry right now. Maybe I did let the wind blow through the car and across my face as I drove because I needed it.  And maybe it did dry my tears.

I arrived home in a much better place than earlier today – again, quite literally but also figuratively. I felt a sense of calm, of peace, and of promise. Tonight’s breeze brought with it the scent of hope, delicate and elusive for the moment, perhaps…but it arrived all the same.