Bye-Bye Alberto

The first thing I heard upon waking today was the news that Alberto Gonzales had resigned. My inbox this morning was full of emails expressing what a victory this was for the progressive cause.

I don't like the guy--I don't know how anyone who cares about democracy could like the guy--but I have to admit that the first thing I thought was that of course they would time it during a recess of Congress, because then they can make a recess appointment of someone who will not try to uphold the law (necessary to protect Mr. Bush and his cohorts from criminal prosecution for their crimes), and then they will probably just put up impossible nominee after impossible nominee and do their best to run out the clock. I hope I'm wrong. But it seems like that is the standard operating procedure for Bush & Co. So while I'm happy to see Alberto go, I'm not yet ready to celebrate it as a real victory. And then next will it be Mr. Cheney hanging up his hat, in time to replace him with someone more likeable, who can then become the nominee (brother Jeb perhaps?) who might have a snowball's chance of at least giving the appearance of being electable? So that the stealing of this next election, when it happens, is at least plausible. I hope I'm wrong about that too. But I wouldn't put it past them.

OK, this is definitely the pessimist in me talking. I hope I'm wrong. I guess we will just have to wait and see how this plays out.

A Taste of Perspective

Something happened a few weeks ago. I had been struggling, really struggling at work--feeling like my co-workers didn't like me, like people weren't giving me any credit for having any skills, knowledge, or insights at all. It had gone on for months. I was pretty unhappy, and I wondered if it was the Universe trying to let me know that taking that job had been a mistake. So many things had gone wrong in my transition to full-time employee that my boss even said to me one day that she had never seen anything like it in her many years of work and wondered if it wasn't some kind of bad karma.

So this one day, a Monday to my recollection, I had had some feedback from my site manager that had me feeling cranky and misunderstood. I was walking down the hallway and I suddenly saw everything, all of this stuff, as just a threat to my ego. I saw my ego there, as this little creature of small substance, with its fists up and ready to fight. And for a moment I saw that this was all it was, this small insubstantial part of me feeling threatened, and then I felt the knot of tension I'd been carrying around in my belly for as long as I could remember just...dissipate. It was like something in the core of me expanded, and I felt an odd sense of joy.

I have to say that I haven't spent a lot of time pondering my ego. As a person who has been pretty insecure most of my life, I had never thought of myself as particularly egotistical, or egocentric. I thought that ego was mostly about some kind of overly inflated sense of self. But I'd been reading this book, the When Fear Falls Away book, and it had made me think about ego in a different way--not so much as self-obsession, but merely as that thing we grow with labels that say "I am this, I am that." I had started to wonder about these things.

The knot in my stomach? It came back. But the experience, while it was fleeting, left its mark. I don't see things in quite the way I did before. Something shifted in me. When I read the end of When Fear Falls Away, I felt I understood what she was talking about, a little. The facade was still there, but it had cracked a bit, and some light had come in, and made a difference.