I'm off on a two to three day adventure alone here in a minute or two. It's going to be exciting but I'm driving 7 hours down to stay with a friend, do a school thing, and then drive 7 hours back to stay with my sibling a night. I spent a lot of my early adulthood driving 10-14 hours to visit the spouse at college. In those days I drove and the spouse didn't, so I gave driving lessons and made the long trip at least once or twice a semester. But it's been a few years now since I did something like plot my rest stops and stock up my car with caffeine and junk food. I had planned to sleep late, and I did a little bit, in a nod to the crazy thing I'm about to do, but not as late as I'd planned to. Nerves get the best of me.
Since I'm being honest, I am prone to doing crazy things like this: working an evening shift and then driving 7 hours to spend about 18 hours in town, then drive 7 back after a study group for an hour or two mid-drive. I have this inclination to do crazy things like work myself to bits or be tired enough to watch the world glow while I drink more caffeine. I have this inclination to test my limits and see if I break. In the past I have found my limit and broken so completely that I'm still picking up pieces but that's for the best. I'm in this introspective mode at the moment and I'm contemplating my life and how I order it. How we order things as a family. How I order my career and where it's going or whether I should try to shape it or just let it roll.
I think that I must have healed wrong at some point, like some arm that didn't get set right the first time and needed re-breaking. Looking at the pieces of my old life, I'm glad to have had them but I'm also glad that I got the chance to fix things now instead of later. And now, song time! I listen to this song a lot and think about how life smashes you up sometimes, and it hurts, but the light shines through the cracks at the end, and maybe that's for the best. At least it makes you a person who's more interesting and illuminated.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6s3LHX25qc
So I know a thing or two about tired driving...I put on 30,000 miles a year and most of it is alone in a car on long drives early in the morning or late at night. Its NOT down time, and I have used up 8 of my 9 lives in close calls, so now I try to concentrate harder on the road and not the thoughts going through my brain, or my cell phone, or calendar, or breakfast/lunch/dinner. I get that it is good to get away...but you know that this is not really taking stress out of your life it is just adding a different kind of stress. I don't think you healed wrong- I think you are still healing. the thing of it is that you are not trying to become something you were, you are becoming something else. Metamorphizing. So don't look for normal, or a familar "right" to see that you are all the way healed. You are what you are, which is fine, and constantly changing. Have a good adventure, accept what crosses your path (but don't hit it if you can help it) and figure out what being overtired does to your decision making process- to me it is a drug in itself, the permantly impaired state of mind. Is there a way out of that state which everything on?
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