THE FOOL

Back in 2014 I had a moment in my life where I could almost literally feel the change in my life’s path. I was sitting in a Rheumatologist’s exam room, and he had informed me that I was the poster child for Fibromyalgia. He gave me some reading material and said he’d give me and Bruce some time to let things sink in so that we could ask questions when he came back in after awhile.

As the news sank in, it felt like I was on a psychic train turntable. There was a sense of mechanical gears ka-chunking. What I thought my path forward was fundamentally changed and my path in life was going to be on a completely different track. I think that overall I handled it very well, but there definitely have been stages of grief over how different my life was going to be from that day forward.

I’ve had other unexpected changes is my life, but the closest that I’ve come to living through another turntable moment has been during this pandemic. Instead of feeling the machinery internally, it felt like all of humanity was going through this experience – with some handling it better than others. My heart goes out to those who are screaming and fighting this shift, and I hope that they can figure out a healthier way to handle this change.

Over the months that our public library has had its doors closed, I have had a lot of time to grieve about the loss of so many aspects of my job. Everyone at our library has worked incredibly hard to make our library, with all of its quirks, a very special place for our community. I look at some of our most popular programs, and know that they may never be done the same way again (if at all).

All of this coincides with the loss of my blog. I knew that big changes should be cautiously done during times of great stress (or not at all), and yet, I went ahead and tried to change up Hafuboti. And I’ve been regretting that decision ever since.

But here I am, repeating the mantra that I’ve had since I began my work at a small public library: “we’re librarians – problem solving is what we do.”

Fortunately, I was able to save the text of every single Hafuboti post, and that presents a unique opportunity that I’m going to take: to reflect on what was, how it is now, and what opportunities it may hold for us in the future. Who knows – maybe after revisiting the first three posts, I’ll realize that this is a fool’s journey. But no matter what, I truly hope that we can all embrace The Fool’s journey.