5/365

Having experienced a week of day shifts, I made my way home with the rush hour crowds in time for a dinner time dinner. It was an odd feeling, being in among the crowds. While I had, I suppose, done it all week, somehow, on this day, it felt like life. Somehow, the five-day stretch had made it feel real, as though a new phase had begun.

No new phase has begun. This was simply a few-day change of scenery. I have spent five days seeing different crowds of commuters, five days spending daylight differently, five days covering the bases in unusual ways. And though the brain has adjusted remarkably quickly, it will have to adjust just as quickly back, because that is the way life goes.

We spend our lives looking forward to or dreading all sorts of five-day challenges. "If I can just make it through," we say, or "I can't wait until," we think, and then, in the blink of an eye, the five days are gone, and we return to the thirty or one hundred or three hundred sixty ahead of us. After all, five days, no matter how good, or how bad, or how different, or how special, is just five days, a tiny blip in our lives. So, while we might enjoy or suffer through five days, what we really live through is the other three hundred sixty.

My five days are over, and I move on--to different commuting patterns and different life schedules. And the trip home that is not on the fifth day, but on just one day out of many.