Keeping up.

I'm trying.  Though it has been a trying fall. 

At our house, we've felt more often like we're falling down than standing up in these past weeks, but today was a short exercise (after yesterday's falling once more) in keeping up.

This time, we passed the child back and forth (no child care on Thursdays) between ourselves and a spare college student while we both attended to our office duties and attended a lecture required of both of us.  And then we managed to meet up, all three of us, in the autumn sunshine of an untended yard, raking leaves, stuffing bags, and arriving at the leaf drop-off just as the gentlemen were setting out the orange cones for the night.  They were gracious enough to let us through.  (Though I think they also were a bit afraid not to when they saw the leaf bags piled in not-quite-on-top-of the two-year-old.)

We got to grab a quick bit of dinner together at the Pita Pit (our favorite fast food in town) before I turned back around to head to campus for my evening class.  Whew. 

Days--weeks--months like these we've had of late both exhaust me and amaze me.  Exhaust for obvious reasons, but amaze when I recognize the resiliance of my own body and soul and the awesome capacity of the people around me to keep going--laughing, talking, working, singing, grading (oh, the grading), and caring--in the midst of what feels a lot like chaos.

Tonight we'll watch a film that juxtaposes the order of the natural world with the frenetic pace of modern life (of thirty years ago--it's only faster now!).  At the end, the filmmaker focuses in on individual faces, slowing for the first time in more than an hour to let us see individuals, humans, in the world that hardly seems human any longer.

Perhaps I'll be able to go home and realize that even pausing for a few minutes in the midst of the chaos can remind me that I am, in fact, human.  And all of these folks around me struggling to keep up?  They're human, too.