The Isolation Journals - Day 91

Prompt:  Let us travel down the shaft of, as Milan Kundera puts it, the “infinitude hidden within all things.” Think of a motif: an obsession, a recurring theme within your own life. Something that repeats—maybe a gesture, like tucking your hair behind your ears, the argument you have over and over again with your spouse, or a question you come back to at different stages in your life. Begin to write about it, considering the question of whether you find meaning through repetition, or if the journey takes you farther away.

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Somebody who probably wasn't Albert Einstein said, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."  In these past 4 months, consider us all insane.  Every day more or less the same, repeating the same tasks, and for what?  Searching for a sense of meaning, normalcy, control?  Every day, rolling that boulder up the hill, only to wake and find it has rolled back to the bottom while we slept.

But maybe the repetition is the very point.  It keeps you stable, it keeps you humble, it marks time but doesn't rush it forward.  For me, these themes, these grounding rituals, are yoga and Duolingo.  I'm on day 912 of daily yoga and day 476 of Duolingo.  I am neither a yoga master nor fluent in Spanish, but cada dia estoy mejorando.  I'll never be perfect at either thing, but the absence of an end point makes it difficult to know when to stop.  I'm like Kramer in the test drive episode of Seinfeld, pushing the needle past zero 'til it snaps right off. I feel like I've made that reference before, but maybe that's another theme.  Everything I need to know about life can be extracted from a Seinfeld episode. 

Where's the needle?  "Oh, it broke off, baby"