Wow what a day!

Let’s start from the beginning. Woke up with a pounding headache. A terrible backache and screeching pain in my shins (from yesterday’s run). Oh also my nose was blocked. So I was having trouble breathing.

I declared myself incapable of sending Tara to school. So Agam took charge and I tried to sleep. The headache was so bad that it was not possible to sleep. It was easier to open my eyes than close them.

And that’s when I remembered that I was hungry by the time I slept after a long evening of back to back meetings. So I ate a banana and sipped a shot of espresso.

In an hour the pounding morphed into a dull ache in my forehead. I haven’t been able to get rid of this dull ache all day. Although the back and the shin are fully recovered.

A day that starts like this can only get better by the hour. But then Serena Williams lost the match to Naomi Osaka and choked up at the press conference when someone asked her about retirement. She is 39. She is still playing some of the best tennis anyone has ever seen. But since she lost, and she is not expected to loose, she is being asked the terrible set of questions. I also choked up watching the video.

And then, Janaki pinged to share that the woman at the NASA control room leading the Mars Rover landing is an Indian (with a cute little bindi). We tuned into the last 10 min of the flight, and watched the countdown while eating lunch. I was so proud of this certain Swati Mohan who was likely making a father proud somewhere back home. She must’ve dreamt of this day and worked hard to make it happen. Or at least that’s the narrative in my head. I hope her father is alive to hear her ecstatic voice telling him all about her adventures at NASA.

Now how does one recover from this? You don’t. You push through. You just keep rolling like a stone. You cannot stop or you might not be able to start again. So I pushed myself one meeting after another. With a dull headache, tired eyes from the Serena Williams video, and a heart craving for a father, I kept rolling. And I am still rolling like a stone. Momentum… is a crazy thing.

Now I need to keep rolling for another 24 hours and then we will recharge on the weekend.