Everything Will Be Ok
I’ve learned something about myself, …which is a bigger accomplishment than it sounds given how dull the source material is. But, yes, I think I’ve learned one of the reasons behind one of my most persistent flaws: my inability to “let go” of things.Why do I carry with me the ego-slicing hurt of a thousand failures, the obstinate paranoia of unrequited love, the sometimes self-destructive need to replace or recapture what I’ve lost?
I think it is because my mind works like a print queue, processing thoughts in a linear fashion. Until one is properly resolved, I cannot move on to the next.
How many things in life are really ever properly resolved? And so the queue fills up with memories of things I shouldn’t have said, things I shouldn’t have done. Like a cheap plasma screen, every social encounter carries a ghost image blooper reel. And when an unexpected crisis shoots to the top of the queue, …everything crashes.
I think this is why I have been unable to write or do anything that requires the ability to think clearly (like work) since the recent family situation that brought us a surprising amount of sadness.
We’ve gotten through it. And we know how it looks in perspective, …how on the great balance sheet in the clouds we are way way way ahead. We’ve been lucky in life. Personally, I have more than I deserve. And we can always start over and try again.
And while I knew these things at the time, they were just words. They didn’t help me break through the binds that kept my emotions in check. So, I spent the last month not being able to feel great happiness or great sadness, a quiet passenger looping through the city with a mind weighted down by heavy trains of cluttered thought.
But eventually, in small doses, the bright shards of life began to return. I started hitting the gym again, regained my footing on the novel in my mind, re-started abandoned home-projects, and began, once-again, to contemplate the idea of adding another to our family.
And I began to think about why I haven’t been able to write anything here about it. And that’s when my newly clear mind figured it out.
I hadn’t dealt with the fear, the helpless fear that clawed at me those days when I listened silently as our new life washed away on the other side of the world.
And you know what made the fear go away? It was my wife’s nerdy version of family planning. She actually used a calculator and calendar, believing she can time a pregnancy to enable her to maximize the efficiency of her school schedule. At first, I worried that she was planning on a certainty when a pregnancy is never that.
But that was just more of the fear talking. She explained (with a laugh) that she knew it wasn’t a certainty that she will get pregnant again, but she wanted to do this extensive planning, “just in case”.
She was not afraid. In fact, there is no hint of fear in her outlook at all, as if it was selected out because it simply didn’t match her schedule. And so I should not be afraid either.
Now, I realize this prose is not a good exhibit of “clear thinking”, but a new perspective does grow within me.
It is absent of fear, and it feels good.
