Ed Sheeran and William Wordsworth

I am a shallow pool. I love pop music and lack any interest in symphonic music and opera. I wouldn't know a Verdi from a Puccini and I'd even fail a pop music quiz miserably. Somehow I hadn't even heard of  Abba until the show Momma Mia came out and I thought Hall and Oats was one man called Howling Oats. Etcetera.

Regardless of my love for the mindless musical pop genre, I don't go to concerts. I feel no desire to see music and experience the crowd. If I like music, I like buying it and listening to it privately and intimately. Still, I rarely buy music so my experience with iTunes has been limited. The iPhone has turned me into a prolific consumer of music.  Yesterday it was someone new to me: Ed Sheeran. Ed and I were together all day in my head.

And good thing, because my head was not a nice place to be yesterday. I went to a wonderful lunch with BFF Dwight and his family and their two new cats. And Tom and Shannon's two-week old baby, Dylan, slept on my chest and snored endlessly. Having his little head in my cupped hand and kissing and stroking him was such a privilege and so, so moving on Thanksgiving. Heaven.

And then home to work, perhaps for the last time in this cycle, with Warren. And then, minutes before he was due, a migraine. My third in two days and an unparalleled cluster in my life—and all in spite of my taking my medications. I have classic migraines that I believe are triggered by stress. But what stress?

I am usually positively motivated; I am drawn to the thrill of a challenge. I have rarely been negatively motivated; I have not fled anything. I am not a quitter. But recently insecurity trumped any desire to travel and now I am possessed of a desire to escape. At night I fall asleep imagining living in a rural cottage (in England—an impossible dream). Daytimes, I look at real estate to test my resolve to stay where I am.

Is the world too much with me? Is that the source of my stress? Sing to me Ed, take my cares away. And speak for me, Mr. Wordsworth, of the ennui of aging.

The World Is Too Much with Us 

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. --Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.