Balance is one of those funny things that you can never get quite right.  We are always falling in way or another.  When new we fall with our bodies.  Low to the ground, we tumble along in a chaotic mess.  Soon we are falling in a controlled chaos that we call walking.

When we get good enough at walking, we start falling with our heart.  We fall in and out of love, bruising metaphoric knees and elbows.  Over time we get better, maybe, but like walking we never really get good at it.

So we construct scaffolds to hold the broken parts together, we use ice to cool the bruised pieces.  We add more boards to weather the weather.

Inflexible, we lumber on our way working hard to balance an increasingly unwieldy load.

Eventually we can’t tell so much whether whispering suspicions come from our intuition or our scaffold.  The scaffold becomes a jailer.  It keeps us balanced.  But it does so by making it impossible to fall.

It would be nice, I think, to let the badly constructed fortress fall off my back.  It would suffice.

But the whispering suspicions prove again to be intuition, and instead I add more wood and ice.

I carry my stress in my shoulders. Sometimes the stress is about work or about health or things I should be doing that I’m not. But mostly the stress is about big decisions that I haven’t made or responsibilities that I need to fill. A lot of times I put off those decisions because, well, to be completely honest I let my concern about how my decisions will affect other people mingle too closely with how I feel and what I want, and the end result is not being able to tell what I want to do.

I am not aware of it at the time, but I end up living under the constant weight the responsibility that I haven’t fulfilled or the decision I haven’t made. It makes me tired and quiet and I need more alone time to recover. But then when I actually manage to take care of whatever it is that has been weighing on me, I feel so much better it is ridiculous. I have more energy, I laugh more easily, I can be social without being tired… I’d like to get better at recognizing when I am letting something wear me down, but it is usually too gradual and subtle and I don’t realize how much energy is draining away. The lesson, yet again, is to take care of things as soon as possible because they don’t get any easier to do later.

So anyway, yesterday I managed to take care of some of those kinds of things, and I also found out that my dad, who was recently in the hospital and had returned again, is doing fine but will be spending some time in assisted living. This takes another load off, and now I am all happy and relaxed. I have been checking off major tasks the last few days, and it feels good.

Now I just need to work on my time management. This whole having internet at work thing isn’t working (I love puns). I’ve started keeping track of my time to help me better focus, and it is already making a big difference. I’ll post some data at some point.

I spent some time this weekend wondering what exactly I would be doing with my time after Peace Corps, assuming that I come back to the states instead of doing another service in Mexico, Peru, or Mongolia, and that I don’t do something else slightly crazy like find work in Seoul or Afghanistan. Assuming that I decide my wandering days are over for a little while once my service is finished. I already have plans that involve buying a motorcycle and visiting old friends across the country. But what happens after that?

One of the nice things about coming back is that you get what’s called a ‘readjustment allowance,’ which works out to something like $6,000 for a normal two-year service. It seems like a lot, but in reality often people need to buy a car and rent an apartment, and that can eat up a rather large chunk right at the outset.

But it also seems like it might be just enough to start a business. If you were super frugal. I have one that I’ve been kicking around for a while now, slowly learning, picking away at it, putting things together. I think I can get it pretty well defined by the end of the year, and then I’ll use my down time to work on it until I am done.

So I guess that’s what I’m going to do. I will apply to law school also, because I think I could find a good school that will give me significant financial aid, and if it all pans out that would be great.

So where is a vibrant city full of smart people and good law schools? Oh yeah, and did I mention basically all of my friends? I didn’t have much love for Boston when I was living in Amherst and going to school, but confluences of events seem to be pushing me in that direction. I also like Seattle, but I don’t know anyone there.

Of course a lot will depend on what happens business-wise and law school-wise. Regardless I’ll be hanging out in New Mexico for a while. I’m fairly sure my actual close of service date will be in the middle of September, so I probably won’t actually make it back till October (I want to go see a friend in Turkey).

On a different note, I’ve been in a kind of malaise for the past couple of weeks, but I think I am coming out of it. I am feeling chipper and ready to get things done!

I was looking up pictures of houses this morning and came across some photos of adobe houses in New Mexico, nicely framed by fresh snow. These are the sorts of things that get me really missing home. Mostly I just miss cool weather. I miss bundling up in warm clothes, scarves, and the smell of fall air in the New Mexico mountains.

Green chili is cliche, but of course true.

I miss the comfort of wood fires.

I miss people who share the same cultural stories.

And I miss my friends and my family, and the sense of warmth that, in my memories, pervades our dinners together and our times spent outside in the grass. I miss thanksgiving in Massachusetts and Christmas in New Mexico.

No amount of sand makes up for those things…