Sisyphus and the Front End Loader

Coffee in hand, I am setting out to do something that feels almost painful.  Analogously related to the level of discomfort of starting physical therapy for a leg that's been in a cast for six weeks.  The muscles are still there, but wow, this is awkward - the simplest moves provoking an outbreak of sweat and intense concentration, and a sinking feeling about how hard this will actually be which only adds darker depth to the regrets of having to start all over again.

I have had that experience, too, in the last year: the leg rehab.  But that now pales in comparison to the effort of writing in a personal way, again.  I am nervous and looking for excuses not to do this right now.  And of course, even though I got up early (for our household on a Saturday) to specifically try to write, I squandered nearly two hours tidying the kitchen, making coffee, running a virus scan on my computer (and watching the progress bar while sipping my 50/50 fresh grind drip of Brazilian Santos decaf and Dean's Beans Marrakesh Express) and surfing news of interest.  Now, of course, the kids are up, and since my computer is housed in the living room I now have a disinterested, groggy, teenager audience at 8:47 AM.

Ah, but now they have retired back to rooms after a few shufflings.  8:50 AM and I have a respite before things get rolling.

I am here because I miss the perspective of cogent and focused thinking on personal and emotional topics.  Lest that sound like an unearned self-congratulations, I am not making the claim my cogent and focused thinking amounts to much, but it is a workout for my brain and my growth as a person.  I miss that.  I miss exploring my emotionality, my motivations, my hopes, dreams and dreads.  My days are full of business, work, politicking and the like.  I feel stagnant in those other personal ways.  Ask my wife.  She will tell you.  She sees it too.  We are suffering because of it.  We are becoming brittle cardboard cutouts that suit our demographic niches but nothing else.  We both have to change or we won't last.  If it is in my power to change that outcome, to change me, then why have I waited?

Obviously, things are on my mind.  Voicing them . . . no, more than that . . . committing them to a readable, reviewable, exposed format is a challenge.  It is a challenge to myself to look, question, learn and change.

So here I am.   De dum dum.

Have I grown in these last several relatively silent years?  In some ways, yes.  I look back on a more youthful self and wince.  I see things that I did and said that I would like to divorce myself from.  Did I really have such a puffed-up ego?  How could I justify being so unfiltered?  What an asshole I could be.  And such mediocre grammar!  That is the result of having blogged and written so much during the period of my divorce and for a few years after.  I have it "in print" - hidden away now, but still there. 

Worse, how much did I miss in the lives and thoughts of those around me, or those friendships I might have fostered?

I think of excuses that are easy-to-hand: at the time taking anti-depressants (that I may not have really needed) on top of a steady diet of drinking.  But that petered out.  The aftermath of chemical abuse of the synapses has left my brain different.  Life feels different.  Perspective is different.  Looking in the mirror now I see a me that is much closer to the reality (if there is such a thing).  I strive for more humility and a better sense of those around me.  For a time I know I was trying to hang on to being forever twenty-something, although that was ten hard years gone.

Now it is another ten years gone.  I still don't feel I have my place in this world.  I do have me. I have swapped out drinking for less drinking.  That is good. I have swapped out anti-depressants for cholesterol medication.  On those hard, hard, hard anxiety-filled mornings of near panic  (things undone, things done poorly, overwhelming overwhelmingness) I suck it up and drag my carcass to the shower.  At least I am not as much of a candidate for a heart attack.  Worse than worrying about my struggling state would be dying in the middle of it.  It has been like a dream where you are desperately trying to accomplish something that will put everything right and make you whole, yet you feel yourself waking-up, furiously, and then despondently - denied the chance.

Enough of beating myself up.  I think the next step, if I want to better love the world I am in and those I do care about, is to love myself.  I have to get past the revulsion at poorer choices I have made, and dwelling in the valleys of my existence, and remember the good.  Oh!  And a sense of humor about the whole thing.  Even the faults and foibles are good.  So many of us share them.  It is common ground to the rest of humanity.

I once riffed in my blog about Comedy and Tragedy.  Actually, I many times riffed about it.

Symbolically, I am going to the bathroom to look in the mirror - just stand there and look.  The light is more flattering there, after all.

Halfway House Through Shaving It Came

Maybe I am only smoke and mirrors.  Or a bad analogy.

In the car on the way to work I dream up all sorts of clever gambits and meaning.  A rekindling of a fire that feels dead most of the time.  Twenty minutes into my day it is doused again.

Or better - like a dream you try to repeat to yourself as you fumble for the light switch in the bathroom, you are one interruption away from losing the whole of an oral history.  Literature in the original ancient Greek.  Castles in the original sand.  Yesterday's seas in today's raging gale.  You flip the switch to the ceiling fan instead, and drop the cap to the toothpaste rather too close to the toilet.  Rinse it?  Toss it?  Hydrogen peroxide?

There's your mirror.  Look into it.  Puffy.  Not S. Combs.

Why try to reach back for that dream?  Here is the day of reaching forward to the next.