If you read my last blog, you know that a couple of weeks ago, my life was a little eventful. My husband was in the hospital for brain tumor tests, and I witnessed a car-deer accident that didn't end well for either the car or the deer.
There were a few other things happening too, either in my life or in the lives of close friends and family: divorces, deaths, 40th birthdays and book writing. Nothing terrible ended up happening to me (Mark didn't have a brain tumor, and I didn't hit the deer), but things happened around me, and I felt buffeted by the winds of other people's change.
"You're caught up in a...swirl," my mother remarked over the phone.
When I think of a swirl, I think of a chocolate ribbon weaving through a tub of vanilla ice cream, an eddy in a creek, a tiny cyclone kicking up dust in a vacant lot. In this instance, however, a swirl was a matter of existential commotion, as if the finger of God dipped down into the atmosphere and stirred things up a bit.
Swirls like these can be good or bad or both. Some people have lucky streaks (swirls), while others seemed cursed with bad fortune for awhile. Swirls are significant strings of events - not just one or two nuggets of news, but an overwhelming pattern.
It may be indulgent, but I like to think of existence as a landscape over which weather systems of fate, destiny, coincidence, deja vu, and karma coast, float, stall, and...swirl. And I like to think of life as a wide open space, with a sky overhead, a horizon up in front, and paths to follow; it seems more like an adventure that way. And you can't have adventure without a few swirls along the way.
