October Mornings -- A Memory

Well, here it comes. Winter's onset. It's not officially Autumn yet, yet I was kept awake almost all night long by howling, shrieking winds (poor stray creatures!), and this morning I'm watching a stone gray sky turn chalky white like when the clouds are filling with snow, and I am slamming the windows against the chill. A good day to stay inside, if only I could.

About this time five years ago I was unemployed. I saw the end coming but what with one discouraging thing and another felt too tired and depressed to rescue myself in time. The Day of Reckoning arrived and I cleaned out my desk, turned in my access badge and said my farewells, promising coworker-friends I'd keep in touch knowing full well I would do no such thing. I boarded the Metra train home and settled back in my seat feeling... I don't remember exactly. A blur of things. Worried, certainly, about what was to come. Relieved mostly, even cautiously happy, to finally be free of the place I'd been in, free of morning anxiety as I'd shower and dress and attempt breakfast trying and failing not to brood and ruminate in anticipation of the day ahead, the office, the people, the work I felt increasingly bored and overwhelmed by.

So I was unemployed and the mornings I'd once dreaded were now mine to do with what I wished. I could stay up late now and sleep in. I could rise as early as always luxuriating in the knowledge that I was getting up for myself instead of to appease some faceless, soulless corporate entity's timeclock. I could shop or travel--except that without a steady income I really hadn't the money for such pleasures.... or I could hibernate for the winter, like animals, like the bears, which is what I most wanted to do anyway, and nurse my wounds. (You don't want me here? Well, I don't want to be here either. I don't like you anymore. I don't even know you anymore.) I could sit in my new pajamas on the loveseat I'd parked closest to my windows, my favorite robe--a Christmas gift the previous year from an ex-friend-- wrapped around me, my bare feet curled up underneath me, the book I'd been trying for weeks to find the time to read open in my lap, and breathe, and meditate, and think things I hadn't time for before. I would gaze out at the changing landscape and quietly marvel at all the trees going from their uniform green to blazing bursts of reds, yellows and golds, smiling sympathetically at middle-schoolers with backpacks trudging and scufflling dejectedly through mounds of curling, withering leaves as their harried parents (or people who looked like parents) rushed to catch express buses and frantically hail taxis.

The world was passing me by and I was grateful for that. In the moment, I was just fine with that.