I keep circling the sales training curriculum like a crow circling a dead possum on the side of a back-country road, pretending I’ll swoop down later but knowing too well I’m already nibbling at the edges. So I rope it into today.

Entrenched in the Now, as they say. Which sounds enlightened, but in practice just means me hunched over a latte, watching foam collapse while the Nurse showers before her day of dress trials.  She’s living in a scene from a romantic comedy, hope my bride doesn’t mind.

I’m living in a corporate workshop about objection handling.

And yet, I tell myself I’m present. I am “practicing mindfulness”, yeah okay…. I am embodying this new form and taste of STRENGTH.  I am, that acronym I made up the other day and convinced I finalized yesterday afternoon.  

Which is a planetary way of saying I’m drinking coffee and trying not to spiral about bullet points.

This is what strength looks like for me lately: not slaying mythic monsters, not climbing mountains, but sitting still with my own restless brain and refusing to bolt.  YES.

Letting the guilt, the work, the weight of everything simmer about Mike Madigan without sending him into an indecisive cyclone.

It’s a clumsy kind of strength, but it counts.  If other writers can make a moral lesson out of buying fromage, then maybe I can write the like from staying put in this chair, the latte, while the day insists on being bland and routine, but more so mine at the same time.