Reflection

Reflect:  To think seriously; to ponder or consider.   

I had some time for reflection yesterday at the connecting airport.  I had a five hour lay-over between flights.  To get to the airport early enough to return my rental car and make the flight I had to get up at 3 in the morning - if by "3" you mean "4."  I think 3 sounds a lot more impressive even though 4 is still pretty early.

I was thinking: "Who the $#!! makes a flight with a $#!! five hour layover, and who gets up at 3 in the morning to take such a flight?"  I didn't pursue this line of thinking very far because generally I make my own reservations. I suspected this was the case in this particular instance.

I did spend some time trying to parse all of the anxiety I experienced on my visit home.  I expected some but was frankly overwhelmed by the amount and the volume of the anxiety, and how difficult it was to dislodge.  

Sometimes I think the length of my sobriety and all of the time I've spent trying to enlarge my spiritual life should protect me from the foibles of the material world.  Ah, callow youth.  I'm a lot better than I used to be but I'm NEVER going to be insulated from problems of money, ego, and sex.  It's not possible.  Ain't going to happen.

In the last two months I've packed up my life and moved 1000 miles away - a wonderful move, to be sure, but a huge sea change.  I've lost a beloved pet.  I've tried to reconstruct my life in a new city.  Then I head home, a trip generally fraught with some nice booby-traps and land mines.  I was on shaky spiritual ground before I left.  Not because I was neglecting my spiritual life but because I had weathered some serious assaults on my serenity by problems of money and ego.  

It was tough sledding.  I could have handled it better but I probably did about as well as could be expected.