Still February

I'm still feeling kind of shaky. I'm having trouble figuring out if I'm depressed or if this is just life. Feeling extremely mortal, which isn't necessarily bad. I wrote down a quote once that I can't find now (by this I mean I don't feel like going through my university journals and dying of cringe) - oh, looks like it was from the Bible: "Let us know the brevity of life, that we may grow in wisdom". I understand that knowing that life is relatively short is part of what makes it sweet. If we had all the time in the world, then time would mean nothing. On the other hand, if I can't stop thinking about dying, I don't get a whole lot of living done. As with so many things, balance is key. And I'm feeling a little tippy.

It's so hard, understanding the passing of time even though it's so obvious. Now just feels so... NOW-ish, you know? It's so hard to imagine that things will change materially. When I had babies I would tell myself not to panic about them growing fast - tomorrow they would be almost exactly the same as today. Every time we eat too much and feel uncomfortably full we can't believe we'll ever want to eat again. And every January I get such a passion for cleaning and organizing, and I can't understand how I let things get so untidy and out of control because I can't believe that I ever won't feel like that again. And then a few weeks go by and things get a little busier and suddenly I can't be arsed to care about the shit piling up on the dining room table and the downstairs storage closet is close to organized but not quite finished and all that drive and energy is just gone, and here I am again. So much time goes by, and part of it is linear and part of it is circular. That's okay. I've made six trips to Value Village in the past few weeks, and the storage closet really was a disaster. I went through mountains of the kids' old artwork and threw out a bunch and kept the ones I could still remember them making. 

Eve turned sixteen. It seemed normal that Angus could drive at that age, but it seems bizarre to me that she can. I don't know if it's because she's a girl or because she's my youngest or because she's a foot shorter than he was. 

None of this is terribly insightful or new or well-articulated. I'm just trying to force myself to keep writing. But I'm also trying to go to bed earlier instead of sitting at the computer for hours at night, which is what I'm doing now. So I will leave this without an elegant finish and go slog through a few more pages of The Magic Mountain.