Spring Ahead

“Feels like Spring for the first time this year. It’s like I can breathe again.”

“Breathe deep. Snow tomorrow.”

“Can we just enjoy today?”

“Indeed we should. Tomorrow you could be up in a plane and disappear at thirty-five thousand feet. Poof. Like you were never there.”

“The modern day Icarus— with a stolen Austrian passport.”

“Or Jacob’s ‘ladder to heaven.’ Maybe we strive for too much. Reach too far.”

“I’m just trying to enjoy a Spring day with a  summery Jack and Ginger if you’d be so kind.”

“We spend so much energy on what happened to these two-hundred, two-hundred fitty people. Where are they? What went wrong? Who’s to blame? Is it a conspiracy? Over a thousand people die every day of a coronary in the US. Not sexy. Doesn’t make the news. We know why it happens. We just don’t want to know.”

“Not with a bang, but a whimper.”

“Floods, earthquakes, locusts…people throw their money at them. We’re incredibly generous if suitably swayed. The day to day death by paper cuts that awaits us all just fails to capture our attention.”

“Now who’s lost the spring in his step?”

“I haven’t. Honestly. I think it was Ferris Bueller who said ‘there’s a certain freedom in knowing you’re totally screwed.’ Whether it’s a plane, some cancer, or keeling over at my desk, I know it’s coming. I just don’t know when. So, I’ll assume it’s sooner than later and squeeze as much out today as I can.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

“That doesn’t mean skydiving or shark riding or anything dramatic. That’s not living. That’s pretending. That’s playing a game. Living is walking the real streets, doing the real work, just more quickly. Just with more verve.”

“And it’s eliminating the stupid stuff.”

“Exactly. And this isn’t that. Having a drink, having a conversation here about things you don’t really converse about out there is living. Out there it’s very specific. It’s about the numbers. It’s about the kids. It’s solving problems…”

“Or thinking you do.”

“Those are little bubbles. I’m interested in the great big bubble. The stuff that’s not on the agenda.”

“So many asshats out there thinking they’re curing cancer. Even ones working on curing cancer. Somewhere along the line we’ve lost our sense of smallness, our sense of insignificance. We forget we don’t bring meaning to us. It brings meaning to us.”

“I’m not sure I believe that. Or even understand it. But it sounds oddly cool.”

“All this ‘look within’ Jedi bullshit has fucked us royally. The answer is definitively not within. It is assuredly without. Our navel gazing has left us incapable of seeing things as they are, remembering how they were, or imagining how they could be. All we see is ourselves in everything and nothing of everything in ourselves.”

“Christ. I’m trying to enjoy Spring.”

“And you should. The earth is renewing itself and, if you let it, that’s happening in you too.”

“I thought my positivity was renewing it.”

“Thankfully it doesn’t work that way.”

“Then, I’ll leave it at one and go for a stroll.”

“Double down tomorrow.”

“I always do.”