This is the futur
e! You can either fight it, or you can rock out to it! ~ Hairspray
Sometimes, you simply need to get away, away from the drama and the drills (this morning’s ran nearly a full hour and a half), pressure and the tears and the constant constant questions. You need to go somewhere where you can just be you, whatever that is, was or may be.
We didn’t have a lot of time in St. Lucia, it’s a short port day and the long drill this morning played havoc with most people’s plans. I wasn’t even going to have company originally, until Amras’ IPM partner volunteered to stay on board instead. The beaches were all at least a fifteen minute cab ride away and besides, neither one of us really felt like a whole lot of company. Not when it seems that there have been precious few moments that we haven’t been around people 24/7.
So we ended up at a beautiful outdoor restaurant no more than a five minute drive away on the other side of the bay; but it may as well have been a world away. For the first while we were the only ones there, snagging a table just as they opened; and the tables were right next to the water, almost over the water, so you could hear the waves lapping at the edges of the deck. That would have been music enough, but after a moment I realized it wasn’t the only music.
Okay, that…is kind of funny.
What is?
This CD, this is Mum’s birthday CD, I’m certain of it.
The very first disc we ever got for our CD player, when such things as CD players were still a big new thing; was a recording of Frank Sinatra “The Capitol Years”, which I listened to so many times growing up that I know the order of it almost by heart. I haven’t heard that CD in years, and somehow hearing it there, in that context, was just…there was something that felt very right about it.
I am very seldom blessed with ‘Avanti’ moments. Moments where you realize that it really doesn’t matter what happens tomorrow, or the next day, or in the next twenty years, you can spend your life worrying about what might happen, or you can enjoy what is happening. I used to have those moments all the time, I’m working very hard to get back to the kind of girl who embraces those kinds of moments – but today was the first time in a long time I actually had one.
Life is not always easy; but then again it’s not always impossibly hard either, if you look at a mountain in the right light, sometimes you realize that it really is just a molehill with a shadow no bigger than what you give it.
Sometimes I make my brain work to hard, and it occurs to me that I really do have to stop letting that happen, and learn to enjoy the days when I can sit by the water, and indulge in a perfectly cooked meal with good company, a world away from the place I am lucky enough to call home…
Sometimes, I really do have to remind myself to let the work stay at work…it’s the rest of the world that matters.