Saturday, November 2, 2024

Days of Dwindling Light and Lingering Exhaustion

It's been a strange week, full of attempts to vote (and finally casting our votes) and gathering gloom.  In some ways, it hasn't been gloomy but unseasonably warm.  Still, for the last couple of days, I've just given up and gone to bed between 7 and 7:30.  I've had this deep exhaustion, and it's an exhaustion that sweeps in periodically throughout the day.

It may be a post-hurricane exhaustion, or it may be the tiredness that I often experience in November--the exhilaration of early autumn has worn off, but there's still a ways to go before the semester is over.

Tonight we set our clocks back, which will probably mean that I go to bed between 5 and 6 p.m. for a week or two; I'll resist, but there will be a night or two for these first weeks of November where I give in and go to sleep even before toddlers do--that's what happened last year.

That said, I'll be very glad to get the extra hour of daylight in the morning.  My MWF commute down the mountain to Spartanburg has felt very harrowing in the past week or two, especially when it's been drizzling.  It will feel less harrowing when it's not pitch black.  Let me be honest--it's also harrowing because of the road being a bit more broken up after the hurricane. In the light, I can see the new potholes and seams that are coming apart.

Let me record one last thing, and then I need to turn my attention to seminary writing and sermon writing.  Yesterday on my way home from Spartanburg, I stopped and got the ingredients for a sensible dinner:  salmon and salad fixings.  But as I drove home with the groceries, I decided that I really wanted pizza, so we ordered pizza, which we ate while we watched a Muppet movie on Disney+.  It felt both like a special occasion and evidence of exhaustion.

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