Oh Deer!

Life is bearable.

And I know why.

I figured it out yesterday morning on my bus ride to work. I was picked up by WheelTrans and we headed out and up Bay Street. This is fairly typical but then suddenly we turned and ended up going down Rosedale Valley Road and over to the Don Valley Parkway. I never go this way in the morning, the traffic simply forbids even the idea of it. But, hey, I'm a passenger and we've got lots of time to get to work.

My mind moved to the agenda for the day. I had two big meetings. One, exciting. One, concerning. As my mind tends towards the dark, I visited my anxiety about the second meeting. I wanted to be able to set a positive tone while discussing something somewhat negative. I wanted to build morale in a situation where morale could be DOA. So I thought about it.

Then I moved on to other bleak thoughts and ruminated in the gray morning light about the gray repetiveness of days. In other words the exact same morning that was being had by people travelling to work all over the city. So, I'm in the special bus while having these thoughts, big deal. We're more alike than ...

Then.

Standing there on a hillside on the west side of the parkway was a beautiful deer. It stood stark still, like it knew it had been seen. In the gray morning against a gray background, I had to blink twice to assure myself that I had seen what I had seen.

Blink.

Blink.

And it was there.

Beautiful.

The possibility of finding beauty at unlikely times in unlikely places - that's what keeps us going. Being surprised by the beauty of creation, being aghast at a morning on fire in the sky, being stunned by a deer on a hillside - one minute ordinary, the next minute extraordinary.

And then, it was gone.

The only trace it left was that a soul, once parched, now was refreshed.