I don’t know. Maybe S. is right. Maybe the last 3 years 10 months have finally caught up to me.

The May Gray creeping outside my window doesn’t help a bit. Today is the kind of day that makes me want to just crawl back into bed and go back to sleep.

I think the worst part of this is that I really don’t have anything to be miserable about. If I think about all this rationally, calmly (hah!), I’m doing OK. I have a (sort-of) job for at least part of next year. The last two blocks of my residency should be pretty (relatively) cake.

It’s just this oppressive sense of time running out. Time waits for no one. Great.

Every day that passes I start to feel like my universe is contracting. Every day that I don’t act, my choices become narrower. The possibilities diminish.

If I don’t do it now, it’ll never happen.

But then I stop to think about it. What exactly is it that is running through my fingers like sand? Nothing but vapor, really. Wisps of probability. All of them possibly infinitesimal.

I’m over-thinking all of this, really.

How do you lose something that you don’t have yet, and may not ever have?

I’m starting to think about what I do have. Family. Friends. They are real. And while none of us can predict the future, and I knock on wood right now to keep misfortune at bay, I know that they’ll be there. Certainly longer than any of these fairy tales that keep running through my head.

In other words, while loss is a real possibility—we are all mortals doomed to die, after all—they’ll always live inside of me. Memories of shared conversations, trips taken together. Random meetings and crossings in this wide world of ours. The randomness exchanged over the ether, by e-mail, IM, or SMS.

This is not something that I can easily lose. It’s not something that can be easily taken away from me.

Which leads me to a self-styled koan that may or may not make sense:

Whatever you need, you have it.
Whatever you don’t have, you don’t need it.

There is a geeky acrostic from computer programming that seems applicable at the moment: YAGNI. You ain’t gonna need it.

It is something I have, I suppose, struggled with my entire life: the idea of just letting something go, because there’s nothing I can do about it at this moment. I have spent many sleepless nights trying to fathom things that weren’t meant to be, things that I knew at the time couldn’t possibly happen.

So it all comes down to the Art of Not Wanting, as usual. Desire causes suffering, and I’m just tired, so very tired.