Call it aspiration, call it a coping strategy, but this SMBC spoke to where my head and heart are at this morning:

Perhaps my desire to see myself as obdurate in the face of what can feel like the relentless reordering of everything around me is connected to yesterday having marked the end of the absurdly prolonged process of having my apartment’s bathroom renovated.

To be able return things to their proper places; to be able to take a leisurely shower without having to do so in the company of whoever else is also using the facilities at my climbing gym; to be able to take a leak without having to descend into the basement of my building and enter a padlocked and cobwebbed cubicle that looks like the place a minor Tarantino character might lock up their gimp… these are fine privileges, all the more precious for their having been absent for close to seven weeks.

I have endured. However, as anyone who knows me closely would probably tell you, I have not exactly endured with grace; I think I mostly kept my patience, but the bottling-up of frustrated control that this demanded has been destructive and exhausting, personally and professionally.

There’s almost certainly some sort of lesson here, perhaps one of Desiderata-level triteness… but the triteness of the Desiderata is born of from its containing a terrible truth. Integrating this experience into my approach to life will presumably take some deliberate soul-work; for now, however, I intend to luxuriate in the reestablishment of what passes for normality in my domestic circumstances, and get my routines back on the rails.