Out Of My Character

 Yesterday I had the annoying incident of forgetting which day it was when I woke up.

There is nothing quite as annoying as not hearing an alarm you expected to go off sound, so you rush out of bed (trying to be quiet of course) and get out of the bedroom, only to realize it was one of your days off and you did not have to wake up for at least another hour.

On the one hand, of course, it speaks to a pretty well developed internal alarm that has one waking up with two minutes of the normal Monday - Friday wake up call. On the other hand, it does not say a great deal about one's life where one is (apparently) only used to a single day not working.

It is out of character.  And I do not like things that are out of character.

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I am, if nothing else, a creature of schedule and habit.  My morning schedule - at least the weekday one - has been the same for probably 10 years or more.  And my work habits in the morning are entirely predictable: arrive, get my 18 ounces of carbonated water from the machine, make my two 8 ounce pulls of decaffeinated coffee, put my lunch in the refrigerator, and make my morning rounds of my direct reports before I go down to prepare for the 0830 Monday-Friday morning meeting.

Evenings are much less predictable (to my endless frustration), but will include some combination of Iaijutsu, reading, writing, language, and rabbit time.  And some manner of eating dinner (which is far less formal and prepared when I am on my own).

Even weekends are more or less moderated, at least in the morning.  Until, apparently, they are not.

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Another incident that happened this weekend - again, to my surprise - was that I got uncharacteristically angry.

The context was the sort of discussion I do not usually have (a political/policy one). The tone was not angry - but internally, I was rather shocked to find how aggravated I felt about the event.  Even a day later, my almost visceral and immediate reaction was not like how I like to believe myself to be.

Out of character, one might say.

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"Out of character", in the strictest sense, in my mind harkens back to my brief high school foray into drama.  To be "out of character" was for the actor or actress to step out of the role that they were playing and become themselves to the audience - in a way, the breaking of the third.  The character of the drama is set aside, the "true" person emerges, if only for a moment.

It strikes me that this could be something as simple as a series of travel weekends and busy-ness at work and a rather pronounced lack of sleep over the last week.  Maybe.

Or maybe not.

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I feel like I am on the crust of something that is looming beneath the surface - ultimately, I think, for good, although the process of getting through it feels terrifying.  If I am fair to myself, I can make the point that this has been the sort of year (or a little over) that stretches one in ways that I have not had to deal with in the previous twenty.  It feels, almost, like a chrysalis or cocoon that I am in is about to break open, with unknown results:  sometimes you get a butterfly, sometimes you get a cicada.

There is a sense that I have been coasting on a manner of living and way of being for something like 15 to 20 years, a manner and way that is slowly ending both due to inertia as well as the fact that in some manner or fashion, some or much of that no longer "fits".

I am not a joyful creature of change.  And yet, I find myself being pushed more and more to the edge of my comfort zone, to the point that I sometimes feel like I will "fall off"  - to what end, I do not know.

I am hopeful that, no matter what, it will at least allow me to not panic about missed alarms at 0500.  But perhaps that, too, is part of my character, or the character to come.