The Difference a Day Makes

Yesterday

Yesterday until sunset, I was dancing with the energy of Shabbat - tra la. At sundown on Saturday, we re-enter the "real world," get back to work, in other words. I experienced a distinct sense of crossing the line from the sacred back to the mundane yesterday as the sun set in a perfectly clear sky.

This morning the weather was turbulent and stormy, after which it became gray and still, thick with humidity but not hot, with showers off and on all day. My first client arrived in tears and subsequently decided not to receive bodywork today. In many years of working together, I've never seen this client immersed in such deep sadness. I didn't ask what happened, but it didn't seem good.

A friend asked me to send Reiki to a young man who was beaten severely just around the corner from Eastern Market early Saturday. In fact in my tra la Shabbat bliss yesterday morning, I noticed that the police had cordoned off a block of N. Caroline Avenue, but I didn't give it a second thought. I wondered if someone important had decided to visit Eastern Market. And then I was on my way.

The man who was beaten is 29 years old, with a wife and two young children also many dear friends on Capitol Hill. He's in a coma after surgery and no one knows if he will survive.

The precarious sense of being off balance, a state I associate with the "real world," came roaring back into the range of my perception almost exactly at sunset and lingered through a night of tossing and turning, followed by a day of intensely real tragedies. Perhaps I'm being dramatic. I'm not sure.

One thing that occurs, in the wake of the bad news today, is that I now feel doubly committed to celebrating the Sabbath as best I can. Life is short, anything could happen. Marriages crash and burn, people are beaten, houses are broken into. Regular, normal, very happy people receive awful diagnoses, seemingly from out of the blue. It happens every day.

Part of what I loved about Shabbat was that feeling of balance. The world was not spinning out of control. All was well and I was happy.

OK. Back to "real life."

Shalom.

This morning