Maybe I really do need to move to Denver, where the air is clean and the landscape looks like scaled Lego village and odd and magical and serendipitous things happen (don't laugh).

I can live in Denver if I want. This is the thing about falling in love with places and people and things and ideas that don't mesh with your own notions of what your life should be. This sloughing away metaphorical dead skin, so to speak reveals a handful of compelling possibilities.

Maybe this is what happens when you're just tired of the cacophony, the distress of decisions, the abundance of choices. You can't make them go away, and you're frightened of making choices from the wrong place and being enveloped by the ceaseless tide of things.

The only option seems to be finding your own true North and letting your life organize itself around it. This is what I've consciously been trying to do the past few weeks and it's been a compelling exercise.

Order within I guess. T was telling me about swimming in the ocean, which I don't really do because I'm small and the ocean is big and it's scary. And she said that the most important thing she learned was that you'll get where you need to, generally, and most people do (she was speaking about this within the context of her triathlon). She said that the hardest thing she learned as a swimmer was to not fight the ocean, which is what she started out doing. She'd still win races because she was good at it, and fast, but she emerged from the water exhausted, spent, anxious, frightened. But if she was still, she could find the tide and move with it. It would carry her where she needed to go if she worked with it. But she had to start by dropping her fear of the ocean. Being still, finding the tide. And when she told me this, my mouth literally dropped open because I realized that she was the most brilliant person on Earth.

Also, I totally get the Zen/surfing thing now. I kind of want to take up surfing.