I’m back from Oklahoma City today and, as always after one of my work trips, playing catch up.
It can be shocking, transitioning between my various lives. At home, it’s quiet. I like it that way. Sometimes I don’t interact with anyone else for hours on end. This level of concentration is meditative for me. I feel most at peace when I can do this.
I know. I know. My mother despairs of me.
On the work trip, I uproot myself from my lovely home, plunge into the semi-hysterical swirl of airports, luggage and rental cars. I meet up with my colleagues and work in a room where seven people are asking me questions at the same time. Or they say, “okay, after you answer those three people, I get you next.”
It’s good to be needed. (And paid!) But I get overwhelmed. I try not to get cranky.
(But – guys? – just because I’m smaller and female does NOT mean you get to overlap my airplane seat!)
Fortunately, I love the people I work with. The last evening, we all went out to Bricktown, in the older renovated part of downtown Oklahoma City. The heat had relented and we enjoyed a gorgeous evening on the rooftop patio.
I posted the other day that being in OKC reminds me of the past, of my family’s origins, of how cities rise and decline. This work project, too, has been like that. I worked on it for over ten years, sometimes at a crazy level of intensity. Then it got axed and we went cold turkey. Now, after an 18-month hiatus, it’s running again. But changed.
It seems that things rarely ever end. They just stop for a while and then start again in a new way, with a slightly different face.
There’s comfort in that.
