Details ...

Ughhh!!! January is my most non-favorite month of the year. The holidays are over, work is piled up, winter is wearing me down, its dark and dreary, and the news (Haiti, economy etc. etc.) is all bad.

That being said, something green came in the mail the other day - unceremoniously and unannounced in an unimpressive white envelope - and it wasn't green at all! I had been waiting for the day for all sorts of reasons - from the down right corny and emotional ones, to the steel cold rational and practical ones.

But as with anything that I look forward to with great ardor - the arrival event itself was quite anti-climactic. It was an exceptionally cold and windy day, so I had to run up the driveway from the mailbox to avoid frost-bite on my un-gloved hands (that being an unremarkable winter event for where I live). After a couple of days, I checked myself in the mirror and noticed that I still had not grown the much anticipated green horns! In fact, all said and done I remain the same - very same person. Which, on second thoughts, I feel quite happy and reassured about.

Some of my insecurities are gone - on closer scrutiny I wonder why I ever had them - but they have been replaced by new ones. The list of things to worry and obsess about are endless and so even if one pops off the list, another promptly pushes up ... then I think of the real uncertainties in all our lives. They are incomprehensible and impossible to obsess about, and dwelling on them for long could drive us either insane or to paralysis. Events like the earthquake at Haiti, bring perspective to the essentials of life and how easily everything can fall apart in a matter of seconds ... that is probably why we must pre-occupy ourselves with the trivial - if only to distract ourselves from the real and the inevitable.

But then again, if somebody, somewhere in some organization had spent time worrying about such trivial things as building codes, then maybe collapse would have been less inevitable - or at least delayed. Maybe talking about our inevitable fate is but a way of escaping responsibility from the reality of now - maybe nirvana is in the moment not in some far away non-existent spot in space. Maybe they lie when they tell us that we need to be unaffected and rise above it all. Instead, maybe the need of the hour is to drown ourselves in every trivial detail of the now. You'll know what I mean if you have seen a structural design hand book, or a regional building code!

Which brings me back to my unmarked white envelope - no matter how trivial, I guess every little thing - even the not-green thing in the unmarked envelope is worth celebrating. Celebrate today lest there be no tomorrow ...

... what were they doing when the earth shook?