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It's been a sketchy couple of days, loaded to the brim with Bad Luck Bears that have me convinced that I am once again at the bottom.

You see, luck - like most everything - is cyclical. It's a wheel.

When I was a kid, I used to have this dream about an immense spoked wheel floating, slowly turning, against the backdrop of an infinite space. The highest point of the wheel was a veritable paradise: drenched in light and the overwhelming joys of life, the bounties of nature and love and all that good stuff flowing endlessly over the rim and down into the spokes below. Tiny figures dotted the apex, rejoicing in their good fortune. But the wheel was constantly turning and, before long, perfection rotated clockwise, downwards, and slowly lost its lustre as a new section of the wheel rose to glorious summit. Greens turned grey as inevitable decline twisted former flawlessness. At the nadir of the cycle, where everything was black and broken - an antithesis hell to the zenith's heaven - tiny people clung desperately to the spokes and dangled into the abyss below. The weak ones slipped or let go and fell, screaming, into nothingness. The strong held on until eventually, painstakingly, they were drawn by the wheel's perpetual motion back up into good fortunes. The cyclical motion never ended: this is luck.

The whole perspective is a little bittersweet. When you're at the bottom of the wheel, you gain strength in knowing that the next step is ascension. But when you're at the top, the forthcoming decline back into bad luck is inevitable and clouds your victories. It's a pessimist-optimist paradox; a rollercoaster ride that never ends. But it works.

And so, when I tell you that I spent all last night throwing up (I NEVER throw up) and spilling grape juice all over my desk, and then this morning finding some kind of crazy bumpy rash all over my beautiful soft feminine hands, you'll know why I'm thinking about the wheel. When I'm suddenly preoccupied with the shortcomings of this webpage (I really wish people could link to individual posts, for example - why the fuck doesn't it work??), and contemplation turns into actual worry, I know I'm not in a very good place. When I have actual deadlines here at work... well, you get the picture. If you know me at all, you can tell by my tone that I'm frustrated. This might not seem like much to you, but my heart has bottomed out.

I'm ready to move back up now, please. And yes, realizing that I'm at the bottom is usually enough to start the upwards journey once again. If you're currently enjoying good fortunes at the top, I'm sorry about this but I'm going to have to speed things along. It's a little perk of the ideology, you know: hurrying the wheel.

Posted by Chris at 12:04 PM >> Commentations (2)