For several weeks -- well, at least for the month of November -- I had looked forward to my school's Thanksgiving break. We don't take the entire week off, but we do take the day before and the day after Thanksgiving proper, hence we have five days off. I was looking forward to the opportunity to lay low, pull in, be quiet, and recharge.
It didn't turn out quite that way. Not that I was busy, but instead of a sense of self-nurturing, it turned into a bleak subterranean journey through a long dark tunnel. It is only today, Sunday, the last day of this period, that I feel I'm emerging and am somewhat myself again.
So what happened? I asked myself that question. And the answer for me was that I have been dragging around an enormous bag of unfulfilled hopes, longings, wishes, desires and disappointments for far too long. Been carrying some of them around for 7 or 8 months. But then I realized that some I had been carrying around for years, and still others, decades.
Time for winter housecleaning. I can't afford to wait until spring.
As of today, then, I am jettisoning the past. Whatever came before is dead, gone, and long since lost to the Neptunian halls of memory's delusions. Do I think it will be that easy? Not really. The imps in my own psyche will troll through the garbage can and drag some old memories back in, but I'm sure their rank odor will give them away. Maybe this is why some people do a ritual burning of items associated with the past when they want to move on.
However, my items are largely of my heart and my mind, so the housecleaning is internal. I can see that several cycles of life are ending all at once. One cycle was about 2 and a half years, with the past several months squeezing all the issues into one huge morass. Time to stop dragging it around. I'm throwing it out and I'm shutting the door.
Another cycle is years long, beginning with my move to California eleven years ago this month. That involved a very heavy commitment which I shouldered for about 7 years. For the past 3-4 years, I have been moving away from that previous commitment. It officially ended this month. Another one bites the dust.
And strangely enough, I can see a fifty year cycle -- yes, that is 5-0 years -- that began almost exactly fifty years ago and perhaps was in full sway, although I didn't know it at the time, by my 18th birthday. That cycle denoted the official end of my childhood and the beginning of an adulthood marked chiefly by internal conflicts, the skewed sense of a quest, and decades of shadow-boxing with love, life, and the usual rites of passage that tend to mark adulthood.
What I'm really having a tough time trying to chew and swallow, though, is the belated realization that my entire life has been characterized by a childlike naivete wherein I ascribed to other people a sense of goodwill and support that perhaps never existed in the first place.
I long ago observed that life brooks no naivete. Wherever you might be naive in your character and thus your life, you can be sure you will be pounded on just that sore point until the time comes when you are no longer naive. You can delay or try to deny the lesson, but good luck; it will keep returning until you deign to learn it.
Such is the case with me. Some illusions die really hard. They linger on in the shadows and dark corners of the heart, but I've spied them out for better or for worse, and I'm afraid that now I can't unsee them. I've finally learned that people are not necessarily what they present themselves to be, and they have motives that serve their own needs, desires, and egos, and not mine. At worst, we are merely pawns in each other's games. I used to believe that if you just put all your cards face up on the table, everyone else would play fairly too. Didn't win too many card games, if you hadn't figured that out already.
I'm teetering on the brink of cynicism here. I've always felt that cynics are merely failed idealists. Now to be wise to the possibilities yet open to them at the same time.
So be it. Time to get on with life. Perhaps for the first time, I am free to live whatever life I can imagine, unencumbered by misconceptions about what that life "should" be. It will be what I choose. The question then is, what kind of life do I now wish to live?
I will ponder that one good and long for the next while. Until next time --
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