At the apogee you're suspended: neither going up nor down.

"It's been one of those days," she said, as we sat down in the two-thirds of normal sized chairs in the second-grade classroom. Winter in the East Bay of Northern California means cool rain, and cool rain means classroom-bound kids who are used to not having a drop of rain fall from the sky between the months of April and October. The Phys-Ed teacher, relegated to showing the kids activity-related movies on the classroom A/V set-up was feeling as cooped up as the kids.

After all, what can you do now?

Using Buddhism to Cope with Ideas of Loss and Personal Failure 

Everything changes.  Impermanence is the nature of life.  As is suffering—life is suffering.  But happiness exists because it’s opposite, suffering, also exists. That exists because that exists.  Dependent co-arising.

A few years ago, soon before we had moved our here to California, I was wracking my brain for pithy, contemporary subjects about which to write, and my wife suggested chronicling my experience as a stay-at-home dad. Now to say this was solely about being a stay-at-home dad is erroneous, as during most of the time my role as a stay-at-home parent has been part-time.