Bow Tie Tuesday

[fflo]

I took this picture at work, but I'm home now, and have taken off the tie.  It's a pleasing tie, to the touch as well as to the eye, my eye, my touch.  A nice thick cotton---fabric people would be able to put another adjective or noun or two in there as well.  It was on sale.  Do you notice the flip-flops?  No one I asked in person today had noticed the flip-flops.  Tracy looked down at my feet first, even.

So I was going through old email more at work today, dumping over 50K of them today.  It was weird in places.  In the early days I did use my work email for personal stuff more.  I'd forgotten some things about old interactions with friends, and tho I'd remembered how affectionately my old gf and I behaved toward each other most of the time, it was still pretty weird reading off-handedly loving words, phrases, subtext, and having a sense of that time of regular, steady mutual affection arise in me again.  I was pretty cursory, generally, in the glancing through of years of messages, but so many little things popped up here and there; all the specifics and flavors and people and engagement that grabbed me made for, among other feelings, a real awareness of how long a life I've had in that job, and how many little lives I've lived there, and while there.

I stopped at the library on the way home, picked up some books, and sat there and read all 4 essays in Oliver Sacks's last little volume, Gratitude.  In the last of those essays, right before the end, in the next-to-last sentence of them all, he says:

And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles
melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly,
not on the supernatural or spiritual but on
what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life---
achieving a sense of peace within oneself.

And now, after eating pasta with a thrown-together two-mushroom sauce, one cat next to me on the lid of a big rubber tub, the emotional wind still not quite recovered after a strange mini-gut-punch that knocked it half outta me just before I started this post, I find my thoughts, after typing Oliver's words, wondering how far along I've come in that project myself--- achieving a sense of peace within myself.  And I wonder, too:  does such a thing, arrived at eventually, truly make a life good and worthwhile?