Fugue state.

The pace of life is such lately I find myself floating through it for lack of a better word. I don’t keep to any kind of regimented schedule, life has become an unstructured series of events - there are things to do, things that are done and that is pretty much about it.

It’s not a bad thing, certainly I’ve found myself in much worse straits through the years, it’s just I find myself drawing a blank when asked if I’ve been working lately or if I’ve been busy. I haven’t been working but, there seems to be an abundance of things to do.

A few things fall by the wayside (the blog for one), not because I lack things to write about but, because I find myself so easily distracted. I imagine putting together some kind of pie chart displaying where the day goes but, I can’t find it in myself to even exert the effort in that direction.

It makes me think about how people deal with crisis. What happens when a person is confronted with an event that is life altering, dangerous or both?

I’ve had a few of those through the course of my life - people putting guns to my head, seeing some violent things reminding me of how fragile we are, all kinds of myriad strangeness. Whenever this has happened, everything slows down. I don’t have the grasp of physics of an Einstein or Hawking but, I can’t ever remember seeing anyone touch on our own subjective view of time.

You’re a kid and each and every day crawls by, weeks take forever to pass and a month is an eternity. Of course, measured by your time on the planet, it truly is a bigger number, a bigger fractional value. You get older and time begins speeding up, days pass in an instant and you are amazed at how quickly the seasons change. The only time everything slows down is when something bad happens, and then we go into life’s equivalent of slo-mo replay.

I’m not in slo-mo replay but, that surreal aspect is there. Between the frantic journeys to hospital ERs, the other loose ends I find myself handling it is a somewhat unusual way to be living.

In the meantime, I came across this on the This American Life website which is an interesting listen:

In the hospital, we give up our normal schedule and sleep patterns; we give up our normal food and clothing; we’re in a place that has its own rules and its own language and its own customs. And in the midst of all this, there’s this complicated human interaction we have to negotiate: we have to deal with doctors and nurses to get the care we need. In this show we hear stories of those delicate and sometimes-not-so-delicate negotiations.

By the way, if you’ve ever listened to the FREE real audio feed of This American Life, you might want to consider making an online donation here. Imagine for just $15 you can get a cool piece by Chris Ware!