Last day at work

Only five or six more hours and I get to go home. I want to take it easy tonight, as I’m going off on retreat and am leav­ing at 6am for the Tas­sa­jara monastery. I’ll need to get plen­ty of sleep tonight. I think I’ll go to the gym on the way home, work out, pick up some­thing to eat at the gro­cery store, then go home and eat and pack.

I’m pret­ty excit­ed about the retreat. It’s also pret­ty strange to think about not com­ing back here to work again. I also have a lot of oth­er stuff to get tak­en care of tonight: I have clients that need to get emails, and clients that need to have esti­mates drawn up. This is just in prepa­ra­tion for next week, but I want to be pre­pared for next week before it hap­pens. It’s impor­tant to me to try to get ahead of the game.

I’m describ­ing my state of mind as «appro­pri­ate­ly ter­ri­fied.» I think it would be dis­turb­ing if I some­how was not fright­ened about what’s ahead for me. Instead I’m just try­ing to walk through my fear one day at a time and acknowl­edge my fear (Rollins says «touch your fear») as I go ahead and do the next thing I have to do anyway.

Fear: ran into that last night when I went into jail. I told a short ver­sion of my sto­ry of get­ting sober. There were only two guys there at the meet­ing oth­er than myself and the guy who went with me, but I was still pret­ty tongue-tied. I’ve nev­er been inside a jail before, and it was a pret­ty pow­er­ful expe­ri­ence. The guys at the meet­ing were both get­ting out soon. One I believe is out today. I hope they can stay clean on the out­side. It would be nice to see one of them at a meet­ing. In the end, I was there for myself, and so while I can wish them well, the impor­tant thing now is for me to hold this expe­ri­ence and car­ry it with me, and stay clean myself.