Half-Naked, Half -Thought, Half-Written

I'm sitting at my computer half dressed, grabbing the moment I can get, while India plays in the bath (yes, I can still hear her from where I am). I just heard on the C.B.C that today is the longest day of the year because a "leap second" is added on to the clock at 7:00 tonight to account for the gradual slowing down of the revolution of the earth.
Fantastic!
There are so many ideas wrapped up in that idea for me, I had to sit before they left. I've spent far too many hours wishing I could pause my world for a month, a year, even a week (just please let me sleep for a week) to figure my crap out. I keep wanting to run somewhere else, start a new life, a new job ( a real job), live in a different country, a different province, in short, live a different life, just for a moment, so I can figure out what to do with my real life. A friend told me once, after weathering her own horrible disaster that she cleaned herself up, polished all the scuffs off and hid all of the ugly parts in the safety of having gotten her crap together. But some of the most comforting words I have heard came from her, after having to weather a second life tragedy after having "fixed herself up". She said that she realized she had to just live through the mess, the pain, the imperfections and find the beauty in those moments of frantic, tears seeping, nose running misery. That the beauty is in me, in the mess, in the struggle, in the workings out. There have been moments, and there will be more, where I will need to tie my soul down to this moment in time and this, living through, or else it would float away from me and miss the glory of finding a way in the seconds of my own life.