It Passes, As All Things Do

Every once in awhile I leaf through old journal entries to see with what I was preoccupied at another time, how my ideas have changed or stayed the same, what was happening in the world, sometimes just for inspiration or to help frame my thoughts. I did that this past weekend and I noticed that six years ago February 25 was also on a Monday and that we had enjoyed dinner with the same four friends the night before (2013), just like we in fact did last night (2019). It’s good to have friends over many years and it’s good to predictably break bread with them.

I also wrote “The brooding critic in the corner (Admiral Richard Byrd’s term from his book Alone) wants to be heard this morning, as well, and he’s insistent.

He’s nagging me, pulling on my legs like muck in the lake and ropey vegetation. That’s what comes to mind. Maybe it’s his way of demanding attention. He gloms onto stuff and acts like a bulldog pulling at a trouser leg. Okay, fine, but how many blessings are also spread before me right now.

I’m a pint down and I don’t know how to reconcile it with gratitude. I guess it’s just write, practice, pen on paper, see what happens, trust this process. I don’t think I’ll even write down what’s nagging at me, as if putting any energy toward it strengthens it. The march towards spring, the ineluctable turn of the wheel, is happening, as longer days and calendar pages bear witness. But, don’t miss February 26, 27, and 28 of 2014. It’s coming, the green is coming, the expansive outdoors, the benevolence, but there are glories here to be seen, even in what I experience today as gray, drab, flat, one-dimensional.

Perhaps it’s better it’s best to not trust the darker imaginings I have, the negative conversations. Just let them be. Everything is pretty damn great overall and I have challenges that I can result in my being bigger and more powerful if I don’t just curl up in a fetal position.

I’m imagining the clink of flatware, warm lights in a restaurant like where I was last night. It was a redoubt against the night and it was cheery just to sit at the bar and drink wine and eat seared tuna and let a hockey game bathe me along with all the conversations at booths, the bar, the singing of happy birthday to a member of one large party nearby. I sip my tepid coffee and I’m grateful for that shared humanity and places people can gather in the night. Lot of stuff to be grateful for.”

I could have written that today. In fact I did write something similar just this morning.

“Enough fishing around, emotions are a storm, they are a weather front moving through, and I’m grateful to know that and just pull on my extra layer and my hat and rain gear and stand near to the fire and keep going, keep writing, keep going towards people I love and who love me and I’m grateful for so many of those. Grateful for the chance to go swim at the Y today and a job three miles away and that I’m fit and healthy at nearly 66 and that feelings are like weather and they pass and for this really good coffee and how I started to laugh at myself about how human it is to make up stories based on nothing more than feelings that are just passing through and you can’t take seriously.”

It occurred to me that what these weekends also have in common is the end of February. I thought, hmmm, emotions are weather and weather is also weather. It passes, as all things do.

I also noted that the 24th was the birthday of Steve Jobs (1955). He said “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

I wrote “thanks for that.”