Time can certainly be a strange beast.

Lately I’ve had this sense that time’s up. We only have about 4 ½ months left in the state, and once April hits, it’s going to fly. I found myself organizing a huge haul of bags and boxes to take to the Salvation Army over the weekend; it’s time to start letting go of stuff; our days are getting short.

My husband and I had lunch at a restaurant last week, popular, often over crowded, hard to find parking, great food- we only go every few months because it’s always so busy. I casually mentioned to him that we should extra appreciate the meal, because it may be the last time we enjoy their cilantro fries and potato burritos.

We’re running out of time, I said, There’s only so much we are going to be able to do again before leaving. It feels like a lot of time and almost no time left, all at once, a paradox of days.

Speaking of days, Lamentations of the Sea was supposed to be out yesterday, but due to a glitch in the create space program, unprecedented in past publications, the final draft keeps getting rejected, even though nothing is wrong with it.

We are on round three of the upload, review, reject, upload, review, reject process, and I’m trying to keep perspective since it’s entirely out of my hands. There is a calm, patient part of myself who knows that it will be out soon enough and that everything happens in its own time, but there is another part of myself that feels beyond frustrated.

I wrote a great book. People actually want to buy it. I have a great publisher. We are both ready to launch this thing. But due to technological error, what I don’t have is a final product, and I’ve been left with disappointment and stagnant masses of energy that I had harnessed in preparation for yesterday’s release.

It’s been a messy, crooked, frustrating process. Kind of like 2016. Kind of like the loss of Brent. His passing was abrupt, irresolute, and jagged. And oh so very messy for me.

As I’ve sat with my awareness of the sense of helplessness and frustration I feel about the publication roadblocks I’ve smacked into, I feel the echo of last winter and spring when I felt utterly hopeless and impotent, struggling to make sense of life’s timing and why things happen the way they do when they do and how they do.

Always ones to have ups and downs, Brent and I were finally at this great place in our relationship, and I had so much hope for our future as siblings. Then he was just gone, and I was left trying to make peace with our broken ending, stuck finding resolution for our incomplete stories and lost possibilities and once upon a times.

It is a difficult space to come back to: realizing that ultimately you really have no control. That the only thing you have control over is yourself- who you choose to be in this world, the thoughts you choose to feed yourself, and the space inside your own heart.

I felt utterly powerless last year, I feel utterly powerless today, I feel globally powerless about the state of affairs in the world and the state of affairs in our country- there is so much that is out of my hands, so much I don’t control.

The thing is, I was never really in control to begin with. Sometimes things just happen to line up better and that gives you the illusion that somehow you are. Sometimes things make no sense and you realize how small you are in the palm of life’s hands.

And sometimes the best and the only thing that we can do is keep taking it back to the space of ourselves.

Keep making good choices about who we are. Try and be the change. Keep cultivating compassionate thoughts. Look for hope. Keep our hearts as clean and as open as we can. Try and find the good. Definitely make a little space for those very necessary human parts of ourselves who feel fearful and frustrated and angry and hopeless and helpless.

And try and trust that things will work out as they should. In their own time.

Four and a half months left to do whatever we can. Its unlikely we will get it all crammed in, so I am going to approach the upcoming weeks- and even this grumpy Thursday with all my moody vexation- by trying to appreciate the moments I have left. Take each day as it comes. Make the most of this time.

And hopefully by tomorrow, my publication frustrations will be yesterday’s news, and I will have a book out, and I will finally, finally see this manuscript I’ve held so much space for all these months, through to completion.

Just in time for the new moon.