Back to normal.  This is what it's supposed to be.  After a month of sporadic leaves, going to work two or three times a week, sometimes not at all, I've finally used up all my available leaves.  Some people take a vacation leave because they want to go somewhere, others take them because they had things to do.  I took a leave because I don't want to do anything.  I've taken vacation leaves before, going somewhere or doing something, that have left me more stressed and exhausted than when I had been working.  It'd be nice, I thought, for a change, to take a vacation with nothing planned.  To sort of catch up with life, assume a role, and play it as it lays.

In the last four weeks, I have managed to finish three books, including the tedious The Lost Symbol, and I'm in the middle of my fourth book.  I eschewed the life I had been living in the past months, settled for something quieter. Like the stillness of a silent water.  Storms and floods notwithstanding, it seems I have lived on a separate peace.  With its own set of skirmishes and little victories.  Still incomparable and significantly insignificant to what others had gone through the past few weeks.

I may have gone through this, initially, with mixed emotions.  On the one hand, there was a month ahead littered with leaves, of not having to wake up every morning to go to work, doing all the usual stuff.  On the other hand, I had thought how this--to borrow Vienna Teng's song--could be the last snowfall.  If I were that kind of grateful, what would I try to say?

BIG friends have wondered about this, about what next year would bring.  If this were the last slow curling of your fingers in my palm; if this were the last I felt you breathing, how would I carry on?  Then I would be reminded of what Gandalf had said, All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.

I had been given this time to make what I could out of it, to see how it would be like if nothing would change.  To achieve that work-life balance that the corporate world shouts, but rarely encourages.  I realized, looking back through all the ordinariness of the past four weeks, that I want this.  I want not just a sliver of it, but the whole damn thing.  I felt good about it, almost happy.  But if life were to throw me in another loop, which might change everything, then at least I had this moment.  That's enough to be grateful.