From Health Intake to Meetings: Pokes and Prods of All Kinds

Yesterday my day at work started with a visit to the phlebotomist.  I plan to do the tasks I need to do to get a wellness discount on my insurance.  Before the needle stick, I fasted for 12 hours.

It's amazing how much I get done in the morning when I'm not fixing my breakfast, eating my breakfast, making a pot of coffee, fixing my fussy coffee drink (which includes milk, sugar, and cocoa: coffee purists would tell me that I'm not drinking coffee), warming up my coffee drink, and cleaning up my breakfast things.

Of course, I didn't get any writing done because I went for a jog at the beach to keep myself from thinking how much I really wanted to be drinking fussy coffee drinks and eating breakfast.

My day at work ended with one of those meetings that leaves me drained.  The first 50 minutes repeated information that we'd already gotten several meetings ago, and frankly, the transmission of that information wasn't very interesting the first time we heard it.  Not for the first time did I think of Beckett and absurdist theatre.

At one point, I glanced out of the window and saw a beautiful butterfly.  What was a butterfly doing 2 stories up?  Feeding on flowers, of course.

I tried to see that butterfly as a sign or a symbol of hope.

Today is the birthday of Ted Kooser, who is also a symbol of hope to me.  Today's entry at The Writer's Almanac website tells us:  "Every morning, he got up at 4:30, made a pot of coffee, and wrote until 7. Then he put on his suit and tie and went to work. By the time he retired in 1999, Kooser had published seven books of poetry, including Not Coming to Be Barked At (1976), One World at a Time (1985), and Weather Central (1994). He resigned himself to being a relatively unknown poet, but he continued to write every morning. Then, in 2004, he got a phone call informing him that he had been chosen as poet laureate of the United States."

I love the narrative arc of this story:  one can work at a normal job (Kooser worked in an insurance firm) and go on to be poet laureate of the U.S.  I hang on tightly to those narratives when I must go to meetings that go from boring to combative to everyone being frustrated by our restrictions--all in the course of 2 hours.

And if I have trouble hanging on to that hope, I love that the universe sends me a butterfly to remind me of the possibilities of hope and resurrection!