Sometime between 35 and 75 minutes a window opens in the room and possibility starts drifting in like ultra-violet tear gas, suffocating your mind with visions of the future. Only better. A better life, a better you. Richer, deeper, more meaningful, more connected, more colorful, more impactful. More than this moment. Where the rejection of the current moment and the buy-in on a new life create a timelessness where you get lost between mindfulness and dissociation. Staring at your screen you imagine yourself practicing MMA again, actually spending time with the people you really care about and connect with, drawing more, staying late at the office less, staring out the window feeling empty less often. Staring out the window at the sunny day that is showing on the movie screen of today. Where parked cars lightly dusted with pollen and daffodils stand erect defying the long winter we've had. Hearing the chimes ring in the background soundtrack alongside the notes of the airplane overheard and the crows in the trees across the street. Where is everyone. You hear your step dad outside the window in the yard talking on the phone; I know where he is and what he's been doing you think. But where's everyone else. Someone pulls up in a golden tan minivan. You hear the creak of the gate opening and you see it's your neighbor's tenets. They are walking down the red brick path to the cottage behind your neighbors house. A young man and his girlfriend. His girlfriend with a long brown pony tail, wearing neon pink running shorts and running shoes. Is this it. I'm sitting alone in my office, putting off starting two development packages I need to create and have ready by tomorrow for the programmers to get started with. It's Sprint 6, supposed to be our last. We will probably go into Sprint 7 since I am new at my job and overlooked three remaining business requirements that need to be addressed but the business doesn't know that yet. They suspect it, I'm sure, which is why the one woman always sounds so stressed on the 10 am Scrum calls. I want to just tell her, Hey, we overlooked this but want to do it right, so we are going to go past the schedule for another two weeks, I promise we will do the best job we can do and you will be happy at the product we are creating for your business, you will be happy with the service we are building to provide for veterans. Veterans. I can't even imagine what that is like. The thought overwhelms me. I balk at the reality of the world, I can't imagine living it. Killing someone, having your best friend killed, losing your leg, losing your arm, losing your mind. Many times in my life I could have thought I am losing my mind but instead I thought my mind is losing me. I can't handle my own mind. Which is why I am heavily medicated. "Heavily medicated" is a term I use freely when speaking of my situation and it is a term that means something I can't stand. I am so in touch with the world around me and the world around me is so out of balance that my mind can't fully accept or reject reality and thus can't go in a straight line. Instead it spirals on some unseen but ever present multidimensional graph where unicorns sit on frictionless planes and discuss the apartheid and bilateral asynchronous cutover in health care IT. In that place there is the sound of a bird chirping that arrives in early spring, chime bells swaying in the light breeze, and a song that you're humming but can't identify. Blocks away you hear the clock tower toll four times and you realize it's 95 minutes and the window must be closed.
