The Murky Mind

"Any idiot can face a crisis -- it's the day-to-day living that wears you out." --Anton Chekhov, Russian author and playwright

Being up to catch dawn breaking over Hong Kong is one of the very few up-sides to the turbo-jetlag we suffer every time we fly across the globe. We're up at all hours of the night (which is generally a miserable situation), but occasionally, if the insomnia is timed just right, we'll catch a morning like this one on the harbor. Since I seldom see the actual break of day, I'm looking at today as the "glass half full" side of trans-global plane travel!

Interestingly, this picture in many ways describes exactly how jet-lag feels: a heavy dark cloud hanging over everything, with shards of occasional clarity breaking through the haze, casting a pool of bright temporary coherence into an otherwise murky pool of mumbling thoughts. Add to this a misty rain shower bouncing off the residue of light and you have a fairly accurate depiction of what goes on in our weary heads after spending 24 hours getting from one side of the world to the other while coping with a twelve-hour time change!

I shudder to think of the toll this flip-flopping must be taking on our travel-worn bodies; I only know the jet-lag never gets easier and only seems to worsen the longer we do these lengthy trips. Regardless of which way we're traveling, our bodies require a full week to adjust once we arrive - which is actually much faster than the standard guidelines that put the recovery rate at one day per time zone! Who really has time for that?

I admit, Chris is far better at rebounding than I am - he can get off a plane, rest for a few hours and somehow make it through a full day of meetings, sometimes followed by a client dinner, then fall into bed and do the whole thing over again the next day. Not me. I'm pretty much a basket-case for two full days, followed by another five days of non-stop complaining about how tired I am because I can't sleep, with constant grousing about the fact that, in this day and age of science and technology, why hasn't anybody found a cure for this miserable condition?! (Mostly I'm just really happy to have a legitimate excuse to skip the gym!)

This weekend I'll emerge once again from the throes of jet-lag and fully intend to post a bright and sunny photo of the harbor very soon. In the meantime, my murky mind is off to bed!