Hope Takes A Break

There are times in every day when hope runs out.
Mine seems to be about 1:30 in the afternoon.  It is after lunch but usually before the onrush of afternoon meetings and usually finds me sitting in front of my computer, either scrolling through e-mails or reviewing and signing off documents (the bane of my existence).

It is an oncoming sense of lassitude that suddenly "thwacks" me over the head as I sit and look at the screen - the realization that in some way, shape or form, this is how I spent the great part of my current venture and that for all of my efforts or lack thereof, things never seem to be progressing forward.  The endless row of work that seems to need my attention stares back at me through the screen - and snickers.

There is always more work to do than one can accomplish.  Perhaps this has always been true of life; certainly it has been true of my own (and this, of course, does not include the work that needs doing outside of the the job itself, the many minor tasks and chores that make up daily life).  And yet somehow, I keep clinging to the notion that I can somehow catch up or even make progress towards truly completing things and moving on through them.

Yet I do not seem to be able to. And so, like a regular air leak in a tire that is never quite enough to justify a new tire but always needs to be filled, I feel hope sort of leak out and float away.

I will pick up, of course - just because hope seems to have left does not mean that my tasks have somehow floated away with it.  And certainly it is not a completely static condition - sometimes something happens that will engage me or someone says something just at the right moment to bring back from the brink.  Yet strikes as true and yet incredibly sad that somewhere out there, there a people who do things for a living for whom hope does not take an afternoon coffee break - and never return.