"It Got Weird, Didn't It?"

I've been mawking on here and there for some time about mysterious stressors and looming things, fear, and all sorts of self-indulgent twaddle used as excuses to basically work through my thoughts as life endured a prolonged period of uncertainty and pain.  Let it be announced:  this will stop.  (And the readers rejoiced.)

Life's greater irritants are a funny thing, though - how they can "be there" for very long periods of time, without quite making themselves comprehensible, and sometimes taking on an unrealness we almost depend on, if the difficulty is particularly long lasting.  So when some fear comes to a head - when it "gets real" - it can be seriously weird.  Your brain has to manage things it's been working its way around for a long time.  Indeed, it has to manage things you've trained it very much not to manage, to put off, to ignore.

Douglas Adams described this in a genius way, describing nothing of the kind of course - but his device fits the situation all too well.  The Somebody Else's Problem (SEP) field.  The SEP field is far easier and cheaper than invisibility, and just as effective.  It is the phenomenon by which we mentally edit out things we can't let ourselves see (or know, or deal with) if the business of daily living is to be done.

Leave an SEP field in place in your mind for too long, and *visibility* may become your problem.  There are those (most of us?) who prefer it that way, but it's no way to get your math homework done.

When the SEP field crumbles, as it so often does (and frequently at inconvenient moments, like a little emotional meltdown at your mater on Mother's Day ...):

It gets weird.

Where, one minute, life's going along swimmingly in the complete absence of water, suddenly the swimming stops, the drought becomes clear, and the swimmer tends to do one of those bits like the coyote when he stops in midair some fifteen feet from the edge of the cliff.  Life goes all "Hey, I can't support myself in this midair" and suddenly you're all worried about a drought that's been on for years.

Ahh, mixed metaphors, how I love you.  (Things can get weird in this way as well.)

I've spent nearly two years with an SEP field which went bad recently (go ahead, guess when), and today - the cartoonist drew a completely unexpected net under my flailing.

And so, here I am, bouncing slightly, very seriously giddy still about how high the net had to be to catch me safely, feeling it magically waft gently to earth with me safely in it, and watching the clouds scud by above.



It's a glorious day, and I am more fortunate than I will ever deserve to be.  Grateful, and thankful (two different things, I have been realizing frequently of late).  And, so far, safe on my way to solid ground.

May your days be as fortunate.