Pre-quarantine, my Sundays were usually transit days, where I was flying back home from a gig that week. Sometimes I would have a matinee on Sunday, which means I would leave after the concert, on an evening flight. And other times, I would be flying out on Sunday morning because my last concert was on Saturday night.

Today I had idly gone over to the alarm on my phone (I really haven’t had to use my alarm these last 6 weeks) and saw the last one I had set. Yes that’s 3:30 am, so I could make a 6 am flight. My concert had ended at 10:15 the night before.

In the thick of my busiest times, this would just be another Sunday morning, underslept and cranky, dragging myself to the airport to get home. Often I would be leaving again on Tuesday morning for another set of concerts somewhere else.

Seven weeks into quarantine (and no work), I can both remember exactly how those 4 am lobby calls felt, yet at the same time feel like they are a distant memory. It’s remarkable that something can feel so close in time, yet so far away at the same time.

I can’t say I ever enjoyed those crack-of-dawn flights, or the incessant jet lag that accompanied by schedule, but seeing this alarm gave me a sense of vague nostalgia, and an odd sadness. So I find myself longing for something, yet also realizing the exhaustion it caused.

It has taken me a long time to be able to accept duality and the possibility that I can hold two opposing forces or feelings inside me. They need not be mutually exclusive; they can both co-exist, even if they aren’t at all in harmony.

It’s an idea I initially thought was confoundingly complex, but have realized is utterly simple. It doesn’t matter that things seem dialectically opposed to each other; if we can accept them both as part of us, they are simply…a part of us, nothing more, nothing less.

What complicated or opposing feelings do you experience?

My task today: spend some time with my brother and his family, who have returned to San Francisco from Florida, where they had been staying with my sister-in-law’s family (done!)