The clouds will pass.

Today is a mild and breezy summer day in NYC. And I'm obsessed with it. I wish I could bottle it up and carry it around with me everywhere.

Yesterday it was hot and humid. So hot I couldn't hear myself think. The hotness was just heavy heavy heavy. It was still 85 degrees at 11pm!

Today is the kind of day that makes me feel like the world is full of possibilities and positivities.

Yesterday was the kind of day that made me anxious about all the things I've got cooking. It was the kind of day that got me stewing. Fundraising for Malaysia, paying off my credit card bill, buying much needed toiletries on my volunteer stipend. Notice the trend? I really do try not to stress out about it, but when I let it get the best of me, money issues can get really weighty and just sit with me. It plops right down next to me, on the subway, at work, in the kitchen, and won't budge(t). Hah.

I was in a rather frenzied mood at work all day yesterday. My mind was going a mile a minute about personal issues and I found it really hard to be present at a meeting as well as in conversations with residents.

But then the Foyer's video game tournament commenced last night. The girls' bracket of the tournament involved them sparring over Wii's "Just Dance 2." I initially had some walls up because the boys' bracket involved a PS3 basketball game, but then Alfred decided he wanted to compete for the Wii, so he played with the girls (oh yea, the prizes for each bracket were the PS3 and the Wii, donated by a Foyer group mentor - I need a mentor). Once I got over my huffy thoughts on gender boxes, I really enjoyed watching the residents dance it out. They just threw themselves into the game. All worries pushed aside for 3 minute dance battles. And I've seen them do this time and time again over the last 9 months. Many of them don't have supportive networks of family or friends, some have had a very difficult time finding jobs, some run out of food at the end of each month.

I know sometimes we as people just have to distract ourselves and have a little fun and that doesn't necessarily make everything else better or more tolerable. I don't mention their day-to-day frustrations in order to elicit pity or romanticize their ability to have fun; I say all this merely to say that I greatly appreciate their energy. And they have often inspired my own energy.

Pete, the GSV executive director, gave me this Buddhist analogy about a month ago when we were talking about feelings of fear and panic: we all too often fixate on the clouds in the sky and forget to look at the sky itself. The clouds always pass. They will come and go. But the sky is infinite and, while it too changes, it is constant.

So today, I'm feeling pretty upbeat. All the love and support I've been getting on the Facebook event I created for Malaysia fundraising is helping a lot. The residents singing "Proud Mary" in the multi-purpose room next door to this office are helping (the competition is over, the dancing is not). The beautiful weather today is helping. And I have to admit, those clouds, whether gray and thunderous or transparent and illuminated, have definitely helped in their own cloudy way.