I have been pretty busy. That's good. Being busy means I am engaged in a bunch of things. I'm not overly busy. That's the state of trying to do too much and failing to engage any of it well enough to feel good. I'm coming up on that though, and need to be careful, but for now I'm just pretty busy.

Still, being this busy has kept me away from writing and that sets off a warning. Reminds me of Apollo 13 when the Saturn V loses an engine on ascent. The astronauts wonder what's up. CAPCOM wonders what's up. The flight director wonders what's up. Then one engineer says, no problem, we'll burn the other four a longer and all will be well. My warning light is blinking and mission control is checking my systems. I'm okay to burn longer, achieve orbit, head for the moon.

The thing to avoid is when Apollo 13 went BOOM after leaving Earth orbit for the moon. BOOM is bad. BOOM is life-threatening. BOOM ends things fast. I don't want BOOM. I've been there before.

That's some comfort too, familiarity with such things. I've unintentionally blown up my life several times. In each case I was dead in space, but I did what Gene Kranz directed after Apollo 13 went BOOM: I worked the problem. Those engineers and directors made let Apollo 13 go on to the moon, knowing gravity would return it to Earth. There was no shortage of hardship and danger along the way, but the astronauts arrived back on Earth. Boom wasn't the end of the story.

Even so, I don't want to go BOOM. I'll avoid being too busy to write, stealing twenty minutes at the kitchen table typing this. I'll write a little and remind myself a lot. Then I'll close the computer and decide what to do next, where to engage, what to let go, how to be busy but not overly so. After all, I'm going all the way to the moon.

And back.