August

Having admitted that the bus I was driving was headed nowhere good, fast, I stopped driving and spent the rest of July and most of August as a passenger, doing what other people told me to do. I found meetings for people who have chosen to abstain from alcohol, and I went to those meetings every day. I joined a running group and ran when and where they told me to run. I closed down the dating shop. 

And I spent a lot of time thinking about God, gratitude, and humility. When I prayed for serenity and stopped trying to control everyone and everything, it often found me. And you will not believe this but also the world went along just as before. Faced with my own relative unimportance, I tried to conscientiously focus on "how can I be of service to someone today" rather than "how am I going to get that thing I want." Sometimes that worked.


By August, we were just two months away from the biggest fundraising dinner of the year, and more than one concerned colleague confronted me to ask why was I so calm, why wasn't I freaking out, what were we missing because this didn't feel normal. Some things, of course, did not change--I discovered this as I pulled the  pen labelled DO NOT TAKE out of my purse and then proudly displayed my inadvertent theft for the rest of the month.

By mid-August I was back online and sort of peeking through the windows of the dating shop, curiosity mostly, what sort of match might be out there for me now: which is how I wound up hanging out with the vegan heavy metal accountant.