The Writing Day yesterday didn't exist. I'm on the vacation treadmill, driving down, checking into the hotel, meeting with friends. My wife has a shopping agenda.

She apologized to me on the drive down. She wants this to be a vacation for me and she knows it becomes less so as friends hear of our impending arrival and call to get together, taking time away from me. She admitted she felt guilty as well for adding to the agenda, which ends up leaving me driving a great deal, with little time for myself and less writing time. She knows the importance of these things to me. 

But all of this is part of the balance, the treadmills and the bubbles. The situation's dichotomy drives the dynamics and can even add to the creative tension that I seem to need. I seem to feed from it. It's a variable in an older equation, what can be changed in your past that would not change you in the present? If you changed in the past, would you still be the person you are today? Ray Bradbury wrote about it beautifully in "The Sound of Thunder". Kill a butterfly in the past and it will change your future in unforeseen ways. Time is fragile, and we're as fragile as our ecosystems. Every small matter affects us even as we decide and protest that it doesn't. 

It was kind of my wife to take the time to let me know she knows these things, and kind of her to apologize. Her words, efforts and observations bolster my ability to step from treadmill to treadmill, and bubble to bubble and re-energized me in ways that all my writing, ranting, and walking had not.

Once again, I realize that I'm far luckier than I deserve. But then that begs the question, who deserves luck, and who does not? Again I remember what I've learned before and have forgotten. Even as I do, I know that I'll lose those lessons again, learn them again, and remember them again, and I will forget them again. 

That's the treadmill that is me.