BitterSweetLife

I wasn’t asleep at the wheel, but I was tired enough to have that awkward sensation of shaking myself out of impending sleep. This is what happens when you flee thunderstorms in Colorado, accidentally pass a rest area, and notice the next one is 79 miles ahead. And the clock reads 1:00 a.m.

Last night, things on the roadside took on strange configurations. At one point, a couple of reflective signs conspired with an overpass to look like a multicolored van pulling onto the highway. Weird.

More thought provoking, though, was the surreality of “waking” myself repeatedly without actually having been asleep. This reminded me of another kind of awakening, a little more rare. Do you ever have moments when the reality that you’re actually living out a life—this incontrovertible, self-affirming fact—simply shocks you?

Occasionally, to use an inadequate parallel, it’s as if I’ve been going through the motions of my life fairly unquestioningly, when, in an instant, my predicament strikes me as amazing and strange.

This is me, my life, and not a story. I’m living it out. What I do is real—heavy with implication. I'm making choices, I'm taking actions, I’m inserted in a world-sized arena...

It’s not so much the clichéd “wonder of life” that gets me as the simple, momentous fact of it. I’m me, here, now. This is all real. Trying to state it makes it seem ridiculous, but there it is. I’m somehow at odds with the terms of my existence, and I can’t say exactly why. I’m fully alive, but not fully at ease in my vitality.

Or maybe it’s my vitality that is uncomfortable—perhaps it’s a mere fledgling kind of life, given to coughing fits and childish fluctuation. This could explain why I sometimes stop and become bewildered when I try to look “at it”—it's still growing up? Whatever the case, between “me” and “my life,” something does not exactly fit. Otherwise I wouldn’t have the outlandish sensation of seeing myself as a “real live character,” of now and then trying to peer under life’s edges.

I suspect that at last, a sure, strong setting for life will eclipse these intermittent moments of tingling soulishness. I will no longer be shaking myself awake with the strange sensation of actually living, Alive in my skin. Me, in this body, in this world, in my life, really... Existence won’t be so fitful.

I'll discover I’m much better at living when I no longer have to think about it.