We can never know about the days to come, but we think about them anyway.

Last night at the youth center, Breadloaf and I stuck our heads in the kitchen to say hello to one of the group leaders. She's one of my favorite staff members: she's also teaching a couple puppetry workshops for us and I just found out she's friends with Miss Rook. We were just engaging in minor small talk about how things are going and she commented on how both of us had these big smiles on our face, just beaming. Now Breadloaf has been sick with bronchitis and we've both been busy with work, but still, for the most part we've been in pretty good solid spirits lately. I said that I feel a bit guilty sometimes, since I feel like lots of folks around me are going through hard times, either emotionally or physically, but me, I've generally been in good mood, even in the midst of hard stuff. She said, "no, don't worry about it -- keep smiling."

Hopefully I didn't just jinx myself by writing about this. I also don't want to gloss everything over either -- I've certainly had moments in the past few days of feeling tired, frustrated, neglected, or having my feelings hurt. But I seem to be bouncing back more quickly than my usual slow-moving emotional self. I think the excitement of San Francisco and everything it brings (a vacation, travelling with Lowenstein, seeing wearemany who I haven't seen in nearly a year, chest surgery) is obviously part of the reason. I think making time with friends helps. I think going to temple on Sunday helped immensely too. It's so easy to fall out of balance, for things to go awry and areas get neglected. But I need to remember it can also be easy to restore it.

In our writing workshop we do lots of free-writing exercises and for the most part I write when the kids write. Which is great for me, since it's another part of my "practice" I struggle with. Here's what I wrote last night:

( who am I? )

Let's also hope the stress of next week's election won't cause this all to unravel either.