Last week, I was disengaged from life.
In Boston, it started with the Marathon, the bombings, showers of sadness, and blooming examples of human goodness.
It ended with a man hunt, more bravery, more death, cities on lockdown on both sides of the Charles River, and the capture of a suspect, alive, ending one set of questions and spurring even more.
Folks around here dealt with all this differently; for me, the days in between were ones of angst and… blah. A party that caused mass injuries 3 and 4 blocks from where I live and STILL on the loose had me hooked on unraveling details and perfunctorily doing everything else.
I can give blood! Oh, they have enough. What else do folks need? Oh, so displaced marathoners & visitors need beds? OK, my name is on that list. What else can I do???
(Crowd-sourcing the analysis of submitted pictures and video was a great idea, I thought. It didn’t really output pictures of the current suspects, but I read it was a motivator for the FBI to release pictures of THEIR suspects.)
That week, I was disengaged from life.
Lost in events I could do very little about, I did a whole lot of nothing; my ScrumOfOne Sprint backlog was put on hold (including writing a post for this blog). Now, maybe not everybody is like this, but I have this itch to be productive. If I’m not moving forward with something, however tangentially, I feel like a slob, and that gets me down. For this completely different, yet derivative reason, last week bummed me out. Especially after blogging about how taking action means you are alive, doing something (anything) makes you a better person, last week I just floated, thus feeling less alive. (…yes, I am thankful I have all my limbs and that none of my friends or loved ones were directly affected…)
Once we got the (suspected) bad guy, I felt more at ease to catch up with daily chores and otherwise get back into being proactive, maybe even do something brave, requiring confidence, which would beget more confidence.
…something that would re-engage me with life…
Two days ago, I asked Tricia to be my wife. She said yes! twitter.com/mlamont/status…
— Merrill B Lamont III (@mlamont) April 23, 2013
I got engaged.