A Strange Exaltation
A cup of chai, slight makeup and three text messages later, I was wide awake. Perhaps, more obtusely alert compared to two hours ago. Starbucks always had a way of making me smile. This was a recent addition to my normally mundane and routined lifestyle. He sat beside me, in the shuttle bus to the airport. At six foot four, he weighed a proud 200 pounds but was all muscle because he looked lean. He had a skimpy allowance, although didn’t quite like being called that. We talked about his work assignments and his past life, life abroad, the languages he never acquired a taste for, and the people he had met. For a typical white guy, he seemed to have a flare for foreign cultures. In spite of him shielding his seemingly orthodox life as a father of three children and husband to an aspiring personal trainer, he could relate to me. I may have pushed the limits without fixing variables or defining the parameters of our relationship there, but I had a sense that he liked me. After all, who in the right mind laughs at anecdotes and remarks, which even I, the creator, wouldn’t characterize by good humor.
“Don’t ask me to be normal. Normal is just not in my dictionary. I have never served wine at normal room temperature or had normal working hours or a normal curiosity.” I gasped, as he asked me how painful traveling was for me. I chanted that without claiming it to be the mantra that defined who I was, or perhaps who I had become. I had several monologues, the dramatic speeches that prevented others from participating in a conversation with me. But that didn’t seem to bother him. I had started my day off pretty upbeat, pleasantly, even unrealistically optimistic. But after five gate changes and several flight delays deliberately announced and declared officially and publicly, I had lost my sense of spirituality. The vital transcendental soul belonging to the spiritual realm had left my world by then, exhaustion had occupied my body and I was no longer human at that point.
Three infertility treatments and two miscarriages later, I was now surrounded by three beautiful children of my own, each of whom were born with a unique fate. Gestations aside, they were perfect, without defect or blemish, like a perfect circle, a perfect reproduction. I was a proud mother. That was something that always carried me away with overwhelming emotion. And somehow, my children traveled with me, in spirit, everywhere I went.
I continued sitting next to him even though I realized I couldn’t have that long of a conversation with him. He was flying American, and I was flying United. But even in that short period, I made a mark on the seat, an imprint that would be left behind. I adjusted to accommodate my small stature, carried my mothers genes, and knew that I needed to accept my fate, balance work and my domestic duties, like a wheel oscillating against a hairspring.
For over a decade, I had worked in that agency and seen leaders emerge and collapse. With great energy and excellent content, I had engaged, excited and even enthralled my peers of several different disciplines in that timeframe. Currently, I was working under him, my hero, perhaps the greatest teacher of leadership on the planet. I personally watched him help dozens of people like me improve our leadership in measurable ways. As a result, our performance had improved, relationships became morally admirable and we lived happier lives. He was a rock star of coaching and his adoration, well deserved. He cared about his people, focused on their issues, and connected great people with other great people so they could continue to learn. He focused on what can be, not what has been, and created a future unbound by the past.
Today, jokes aside, I was generally absorbed with the everyday underpinning of my chaotic mess of my life. But I managed to see the difference in any job, even where money was not related to performance. Back in high school, even a skeptical wise-cracking jokester like me had seen that some teachers had a calling for the profession and some did it to make a living. But my success had made me superstitious. Well, to a degree we’re all superstitious, aren’t we! In many cases, the higher we climb the totem pole, the more superstitious we become.
I was a program manager with a persistent morbid meditation on problems and he was my right hand man, someone whose advice I constantly sought.
The shades of blue in the sky reminded me of my interest in his world and that absorbed me. I was like a black star, that absorbed all matter around it. It was like I was wearing mirrored shades, with spectacles darkened to protect me from glare of the outside world. He was unpredictable and unreadable. And I had no energy to decipher codes. I was tired, wondering what I’d cook for dinner that night and how I’d convince my 5 year old to get out of the Minnie Mouse dress and my 3 year old from her princess swimwear, that they insisted on labeling sleepwear. Those thoughts marched aggressively for the purposes of conquest and occupation. I wanted to talk about everything under that sky. Instead, I stood up and walked away knowing that moment would never return, accepting that I needed to go back to my life, my identity clashing with that of the person who found solace in his company.
The stillness of the moment gave me the chills, made me want to capture the silence and wrap it up so I could carry it with me when I went home. I kept walking, further and further away from him and everything he represented. That day, I realized how cold my heart had become, how the moth-eaten stories about my life had finally caught up to me slowly showing signs of wear and tear like an old house with dirty windows and tattered curtains. I kept walking, further and further, knowing that it was impossible to grow back my old heart in the exhausted soil I had planted myself in. And yet, I was in unison with my inner self, listening to sweet music in perfect rapture, boldly living with my little idiosyncrasies and accepting the dogmas of my life: The life of a single working mother.
