That Eureka Moment

It is Tuesday afternoon and I treated myself to a late sleep in.

When I returned from shift last night I went straight to the installation of my antivirus software which had failed numerous times in the past week.

This is a new set of woes with a new program, not the same ones from a couple of months back. Since then my computer has been unprotected and so I have avoided using the wireless connection.

Two weeks ago I saw that London Drugs had this program on sale for $14.99 and since my old program had expired I bought it.

After the first few days I was starting to regret it, thinking that maybe the low price was because the program didn’t install properly or that it was an attempt to dump product that was not popular.

I had shared my struggles with a few co-workers, one of whom kindly offered to help me install it. But I had already decided that this was my version of playing with toys, and that I was going to soldier through, not sweat the small stuff (as I had done on the last go-round) and achieve success on my terms.

There is nothing like that Eureka moment, when sometime you have been struggling with finally happens to fall into place.

This time, the evening before I had carefully prepared my laptop by doing a thorough cleanup of files, registry and the morning I left for work I defragmented the hard drive, an operation which took about an hour and a half.

After a busy day at work I came home, took off my work clothes, washed up and poured myself a glass of red wine. Then I took the antivirus program box out of my desk, set my laptop up and began the installation process. Once the disk is in the drive it is merely a matter of waiting and ticking the appropriate boxes.

While the initial install was completing I was thinking about my meeting at lunch with an older man from Japan. I had sat down with my bowl of soup and he was sitting nearby on a chair holding a backpack and he kept smiling in my direction and nodding.

When I began to eat, he started up a conversation in very broken English, asking me if I was from here. He used his hand to gesture to the floor, and it was almost as though he was asking if I lived at the Bistro where I was eating.

But his drift was easy to get, as it is when one meets a fellow traveler no matter what the language barrier and where there is no mis-intention. This has happened to me on so many journeys in my past. Deep things are discussed using limited means.

He told me he was from Okayama and had traveled up from San Diego via Amtrak and that he would be headed back to Japan at 5:30 the following morning. With everything he communicated there was a laugh and a child-like smile.

He told me he was 72 and that he had spent the last few days skiing at Whistler.

“You are a braver man that I am,” I countered and he laughed loudly.

He told me that when he was young he liked to “play karate” and I could see his training in his bearing and in his eyes. I guessed that was why at 72 he had the stamina and balance to go skiing, something I have never tried and cannot imagine myself doing.

The subject of our talk drifted from Zen Buddhism, to sports, to Shinto, to Aikido, to children (he has three of his own), to the size of his town (8000 house, bigger than a-Stanrey Park) he quipped in his cute accent.

He commented on my healthy meal, salad and soup and so I began to describe my first discovery of author George Oshawa who had cured himself of cancer by adopting the diet of the Buddhist monks in Japan. But I didn’t have to say much. He was already familiar with whole story.

His presence was very soothing and didn’t disturb me at my meal, which would normally be the case if someone was asking a lot of questions while I was trying to eat and then hurry back to work in time for my shift.

I had already told him that I was going back to work and so when I finished I stood to leave. He stood too and reached to shake my hand and so I bowed to him Japanese fashion and he returned the bow and then gave me the gentlest of handshakes, thanking me for talking to him.

When I left I had more energy than when I sat down and it came to me that this meeting was a real gift, something I had not had to go in search of.

Back at the ranch, after my initial software install I logged on to the internet via dial up as I don’t have a wireless portal in my apartment.

I have a an hour and a half window before the connection shuts down and my update completed fully with only 2 minutes to spare.

It was all systems go and a fulfilling Eureka moment for me.

And last night I slept like a baby.