Fault Lines

Zach and I are approaching the three-year mark on The Era of Misfortune, throughout which we have been beset by a streak of illness, death, and straight-up bad luck so relentless that it has bordered on the farcical.

I am not by nature a superstitious person, but I find myself of late hesitating to utter (or write) sentences that begin with, "Zach and I are planning. . . ." It seems as though every time we resolve to do something that might be considered forward progress, lightning bolts take immediate aim at our heads and unleash another round of destruction.

Nevertheless, we do appear to be—at least momentarily—between health crises. (I sincerely hope that sentence contains enough hedging to prevent Fate from even noticing, let alone being tempted.)

That means we have been able to turn our attention to other matters: items that simmered along while we dealt with all the truly important stuff and are now threatening to boil over any second.

My old boss had a term for this. In one corner of his desk he kept something called "the bite-me pile." Every single item in that stack could, at any time, turn around and bite him because he hadn't yet taken care of it. And he hadn't yet taken care of it because he was busy handling truly urgent matters.

Sometimes things found their way out of the bite-me pile only after they'd bitten him—typically when his boss or some other higher-up called to ask why something hadn't been done. Sometimes, when all the emergencies had momentarily subsided, he was able to tackle the pile in a more ordered fashion and "get out in front" of this item or that.

At the moment, life seems like one enormous bite-me pile. I cannot think of one area in which I am not egregiously behind.

And while I see small bits of progress, there is a gaping chasm between where I am today and where, even with repeatedly lowered expectations, I'd like to be. That goes for everything from big-ticket items like family and career to prosaic concerns like getting caught up with e-mail and phone calls and all the reading I want to do.

I'm sure that some of my angst is affected by the overwhelming uncertainty around us: the election, the economy, the environment, the general instability in the world.

But much of it comes from within. The tectonic plates of our lives have been shifting so much these past few years that it's been impossible to find solid footing. And this perpetual upheaval has diminished not just my energy and enthusiasm and determination.

It has also, in some undeniable way, diminished me.