My head does not stay still. My brain seems to slosh about in my head. My mind is fuzzy. Light. Floating. But not at all in a comforting way. It feels untethered. Thoughts and ideas squirt through my hands and slide away from me. If I get too ambitious--if I go upstairs to my office to read or try to pick up one of our sons' toys--I feel dizzy and my brain becomes a two ton weight demanding I sit down. It's a weird and frustrating experience.
Yesterday, I found out that I have vertigo. I had a vague notion of the malady, but one that was overinformed by an Alfred Hitchcock film and a U2 song. Basically something small has gone awry inside my inner ear and that has transformed my living room into a ship sailing upon a choppy sea. I was given some medication and hopefully that will get my head to stay put.
It's interesting how one tiny thing wrong messes everything up. Something is off inside my ear, but that has put me out of commission for several days. Yet I guess it is always one tiny thing, isn't it? The grain of sand in the microchip can mess up the entire computer. For those who were navigating across the ocean, the ship being pointed a degree in the wrong direction could have disastrous results.
And that provokes this internal dialogue:
1: Good grief, what if we're at sea?
2: What?
1: What if this in between place we're in is not the wilderness with landmarks and some sense of where we're supposed to go, but what if it's the gaping ocean? No landmarks. Just waves of blue in every single direction. And what if we're a few degrees off? What if we've been a few degrees off weeks, months? Are we going to crash into some jagged shore? Are we going to go in circles? Are we going to get scurvy? I don't know what scurvy is a metaphor for, but I don't want to get metaphorical scurvy!
2: Shut up! You're being overdramatic!
1: You're being overdramatic!
And then I realize that maybe vertigo is not the only problem with my head.
The comfort is that I am, hypothetically, not alone on this journey. God is there to provide grace for the screw ups, guidance for when the waves toss me about, and, um, fruits of the Spirit for the metaphorical scurvy...I guess. I say hypothetically because it is a belief that I have to take on faith.
I am going to sit with this idea of being at sea for a bit. It seems to raise the stakes. There is less safety. What one does seems to matter more. And, going along with the idea of grace, there is more surprise at what land you find when your ship runs ashore.
