Are we there yet?

It doesn’t always have to be chaotic to be good.

I put my elbows on the window frame and look out toward the school playground. The big maple that is just at the edge has a two-tone look. The top, where the sun falls, is a bright yellow. The underneath is still green. The ground is already covered with fallen leaves, though there are many more to come. At recess, the children are already trying to push them into piles with their shoes. Mostly, though, they just run through them and hope for the best—to stir up a rush of color behind them.

That’s what I’m looking for. A rush. I want to feel the incipient mania—not the full-on 24/7 catastrophe living kind of mania. Just the beginning. Where I still feel like me, and I want to try harder, do more. I don’t get that now and I have to say that I miss it.

I miss that sense of competence, of confidence, of determination that I can do it. That this time, I’ll really finish that project. That I’ll come through with flying colors. That I’ll make them notice.

But it never really works out that way. Because, as the saying goes, what goes up, must come down.

And the down is really down. Down in the valley, and let me tell you, the valley is low. So low. Like a Death Valley of the soul.

Nothing gets done. Nothing gets finished. The flying colors fly back to the rainbow, or wherever it is that flying colors go when they get tired of waiting for me to arrive on my magical unicorn of incipient mania.

After all, everyone knows unicorns aren’t real anyway.