The Meta Pause

When the movie Inception came out, the concept of something being meta really sunk in for me. Sure, I had learned about it in college (h/t: GEB), but it was suddenly much clearer. For those of you who are blissfully outside of the meta-verse, it is basically a thing within a thing. If this journey is a pause from where I was in life, this next segment of time is a pause from the pause. 

One thing about living on the road that is easy to overlook is that you don't have a homebase of operations. While that seems painfully obvious in some ways, it isn't in others. For example, you can go to the eye doctor almost anywhere. However, you have to stay there if you are going to pick up new glasses with your specific prescription in some future timeframe. Hence, a pause within a pause.

Right now, I am looking out the window to a hazy blue sky with the sturdy ribbons of brown and green of pine (or fir) trees sweeping upward to break the blue. There is snow on the ground and on some of the branches of the white oaks; who long since shed their leaves for the season. The sunny spots will be slush by this afternoon and rain will wash away most of the rest later this week. I might brave the icy switchbacks today for a hopeful walk-in with an optometrist or to get my oil changed. I might hedge my bets and wait until everything is clear later in the week and then ask for a prescription to fill at some future location. 

I might decide to take this pause to binge Netflix, take walks, catch up on the 20+ places I have yet to blog about, make phone calls about paperwork, scour maps for future adventures, or just take a nap. I will definitely catch up on grading and wrap up this semester for all of my students while I have a solid WiFi connection.

To find out just how meta this pause gets, you'll have to keep coming back.