Deep Moment Time

Maybe I perceive people as nicer when I am tired, but they have been remarkably nice to me this week, and I feel my head inflating with a barely detectable hissing, like a balloon in a related rates calculus problem. Honestly, these kind souls have left me very bewildered; although I believe that people are good and life is better, the praise to admonition ratio has been disconcertingly high as of late. There have been and will be weeks when people are not nearly as nice, or when they show artificial kindness and then seem to leave me marooned on the island of a desolate consciousness. I am predicting a record high in weeks that are all work with no measurable reward and strife with no improvement this year (it’ll be partly cloudy, folks). I can also foretell that there will be weeks in which the some of the same people who were sweet and loving will be unbearable, and times when some of them will need me. Some will fall into both categories, and therefore it is imperative that I remember the past week for them. I must remember the past week for myself as well, to cherish and reserve the memories of my inflated self-confidence on cloudy and other days when I run low on morale.

I am fortunate that my experiences insofar have always led me to believe people are good and life is better. Recently, however, I have made some groundbreaking discoveries that I believe have made me much calmer as a whole. For example, once I figured out that everyone on around me on average thinks about themselves about as much as I do, it became easier to obey the cliché recommended by the famous British World War Two poster.  It also helps to know that things level out- once upon a time, the good weeks were average and the bad weeks abysmal, but now things seem to be heading towards the happy equilibrium of positive and negative adults always use to describe life.