perspective

Note: Skip this if you're in the mood for something light.

My boss is not doing well. When I go in there to talk to him about which restaurant we should order lunch from for our joint birthday lunch, he's open for any of the favorites: Penang, Indian, and Chinese/Thai (everyone's happy with this last one because you can order pretty much anything under the sun). But when I ask him how he's feeling, he says much better after the blood transfusion. That these two conversations can happen within the same 2 minutes is still hard to comprehend.

But we do still sit in the lunch room with the PI from the lab next door (who is my boss's age) and talk about which movies we've seen lately while I'm thinking about how Boss goes home during lunch to sleep because he doesn't have the energy to make it all day at work. The nagging question persists- what is the right balance? How much weight do you give to keeping in mind that life is so very delicate and how much to living free of thoughts of impending death? If you focus more on the first, you miss out on life, but if you focus more on the second, you take things for granted. A conundrum.