luckiest

have i mentioned before that every now and then i feel incredibly lucky and hopeful?  is it a realization? or a feeling?  i don't know yet.
do you remember being a kid and trying to decide between being an architect, an artist, a flight attendant, a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, an interior decorator, and an author?  and all of those options seemed possible, it was just sort of a matter of choosing which one you wanted to be the most.  and then as you got older you realized you weren't very good at chemistry, or drawing straight lines, that your creative writing was missing a bit of brilliance, and your mind was always tricking you into thinking the plane was about to go down?  the options narrowed.  you think-- were they even ever real to begin with?
i remember my stomach sinking every time i'd hear garrison keillor's voice on the radio saturday evenings, the year before i started law school.  saturday evening meant sunday was quickly approaching, which was the day before monday, which meant another week of 7:30-4:30 with exactly 1 hour of lunch (too long) to be taken at exactly 11:30.  that my years could just go on this way, neverminding that there might be seasons changing outside-- i would just be on a loop.
do i understand the vantage point from which i'm writing this?  well, i understand that feeling claustrophobic in a 40 hour per week job that gave me a longer lunch than i needed and paid me something to live on is foolish compared to the experiences that others are having, experiences i will probably (fortunately) never have.  and that there is so much going on right now, and really always, that have people feeling like the world has just stopped for them so what are people like me doing going on writing as if nothing had happened.  fair enough.  i think i haven't lived long enough to know if this is just how it works or if i'm just too tired right now to hold it all or analyze it all or do anything about it, besides complain with greg about people who are just "standing their ground."  i have a responsibility to be a decent person, at the least, when i'm not doing more to do good, and to raise my children into decent adults, so that maybe they'll do good in their lives.

it feels a little frivolous to write about how lucky i feel, but for my own life, and having been that person once to have said, how can you carry on like this when the world just suddenly stopped, to know always then what it feels like to have a heart break, i just want to cling to this feeling that anything good is possible, from today forward, for me, greg, william, henry.  (except that i still probably won't be a flight attendant, architect, doctor, artist...thankfully.)  for now though, i feel like we've escaped the loop, and it's a happier place to be.