Day 22: Subject Tells Herself a Parable

Last night I had a dream.  I was visiting a famous ancient bridge--a wonder of pre-modern architecture called the Blue Mile Bridge, named after the mile wide expanse of blue between the banks.  It was a long trip out to where the bridge spanned the river.  On the way I got to chatting with a local, just talking about our lives, and after I told her a little bit about myself she laughed and said, "Honey, you're swimming the blue mile."

In my dream, she told me the story of how this bridge had been necessary, for what reason I don't know.  But it HAD to be built, only no one could figure out how.  So a sick architect, one who was dying, decided to try something no one had ever tried before.  He was going to swim the river--swim the blue mile--and try to figure out how to build the bridge.

The swim was supposed to be deadly, because the current was strong and there was an enormous waterfall only a short distance off, but the architect made it.  In fact, he not only swam the blue mile once, he did it a number of times, marking places where pylons could be safely sunk and the crooked route that the bridge would need to follow.  His illness claimed his life before the bridge was finished, but he had done enough, and the very necessary bridge was built.

The woman I was speaking with told me that to this day adventuresome locals sometimes swam the river, following the path of the bridge in honor of the architect.  She'd once done it with her daughter, and she said at first you focused on lots of things--how cold the water was, how scared you were of the falls, how tired you got almost immediately.  But as the swim went on you focused on only one thing: getting yourself and your loved ones to the other side safely.  She said that once you stopped worrying about all those other things, once you just accepted that they were what they were, and that--in that moment at least--they didn't matter, the swim got a whole lot easier.

Then I woke up, and I stared at my ceiling for a while, thinking that over.  And today... today things seem a little easier.
 
Sometimes my subconscious drops the mic in my dreams.