After several days of spending time with family and then not so lovely family - after having my moments charged with joy and relaxation and happiness, only to have them charged with terrible negativity and mean-spiritedness during the last 24 hours of vacation, I returned home to lick my wounds, read, heal. Yet the memory of the words spoken and the awfulness of it all keeps ringing in my head. I can't make sense of it all, how things got so quickly off the mark with a few words...just a few...spoken to me in anger.
So it is that I marvel at the words of Jon McGregor in So Many Ways to Begin, read last night, and their salve-like quality:
"Lives were changed and moved by much smaller cues, chance meetings, over-heard conversations, the trips and stumbles which constantly alter and readjust the course of things, history made by a million fractional moments too numerous to calibrate or observe or record."
Ah, so it is. And while the words of only some hours ago still linger, McGregor's are far more powerful, far more spot-on. Far more "me" than any awful thing that I heard this weekend.
I'm half-back today, fully-back tomorrow. Cheers until then.