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The Year of Living Languorously

5/27/2018

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Picture
Leave the familiar for awhile.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.

Hafiz

... or a year. 


Langourous refers to a certain kind of mood everyone gets in sometimes—when you'd rather lie around thinking than doing work or having fun. When you're languorous, you're tired and maybe a little depressed.
Vocab.com

Languor: 1. weakness or weariness of body and mind, 2. listless indolence or inertia.
Merriam Webster



To hear the ex tell it, my year in the 808 has been an absolute boondoggle.
A nonstop bonbons-with-people-waving-fans-on-me fest. 
Not to burst his narrative but it has, to the contrary, been a paradise paradox. My temporary soft-air, mountain, ocean world was spun out of its orbit, rendered adrift, when my two youngest teens opted to go back to NorCal in December. Needing a handle, as it were, I wound down the LLC I had started last fall with a friend (which didn't pan out for myriad reasons) in favor of a full-time job outside the home* for the first time since 2001, the last time I had to be at a desk by 8a, fully awake, interacting, adding value (whatever that means). I was pregnant with my second of three daughters then. It's easier now because ... no diapers. I wake up at 6a, adhere strictly to the morning routine, help women, work out at lunch, help more women, walk with purpose to to catch the 5:08p express bus, take in the arresting elements through the tinted glass at 50 mph with fellow commuters who, it turns out, I like to chat up when I'm not reading a book (a book!) because they are nice and pleasant. I collapse into bed by 9p, too tired to read, but not too tired to watch compelling television—hello, highlight of my week: Handmaid's Tale.
("Your job, the TV, the parade of out-of-town guests are all distractions which help you cope with not being with your teens,"
says my always-right therapist, matter-of-fact).
 While it has decidedly not been the year of living languorously, it has been a year of
discovering and dwelling in new rooms of my mind ...
of non-attachment ...
of embracing the unexpected ... of 
letting go ... of longing and living, off-kilter.
And remembering that what goes around comes around, eventually. 

  



*Fiction lede ...
She worked her ass off inside the home for 13 years while her husband globe-trotted. She worked ad hoc part-time jobs after their third was born but never took tennis lessons or worried out loud (much) about making her acupuncture appointments, 
which made her privileged but not entirely insufferable. 



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    Here, I am a writer and change agent. Opinions: not vetted. Stories: my own. 

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