At various times in my life, I’ve found myself outside in the quiet night air coming to the re-realization that our time is short. I end up fighting through emotions of fear, deep sadness, panic, helplessness, and existential futility. I look up, take note of what must be a planet for its brightness, and am pummeled by our insignificance. Someday we’ll be gone. The moment usually ends with me in retreat from the thoughts because it’s more than I can take in my heart. “Don’t do this to yourself again. Nothing comes of it other than you feeling awful.” See, I’m not a real big believer that my existence is a gift to me.
It strikes me that I am 33 years old, and if I’m lucky, have roughly 50 years left to come fully to peace with myself and make a full life to look back on happily at that age.
It strikes me, that for the enormity of my heart, I’m starting to become afraid that its exercise is mostly from the weight I carry on it and pains inflicted to it. There doesn’t seem to be much natural positive exercise fed through it. That doesn’t make for much happiness.
Simultaneously, I am finding that I want to douse certain people I see with affection, and that I’m not quite comfortable transitioning to that sort of affection in relationships that have traditionally been void of it. They both affect me differently. I feel the first is a reflection of my own immense need for affection being projected from myself onto other people (that I see looking as sad as I feel). The second is just awkward and takes time.
More and more when a lot of this hits, I come back around to being thankful for something, no matter how small. Perhaps it’s just one of those protective things people develop to deal with this world, but I never used to do it.
It doesn’t make anything right, really, but it helps.
Tonight, I am looking forward to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. They make me laugh, and that has to be good enough for right now.
Here’s hoping my life isn’t 50 years of distractions from bad feelings like so many people settle for. So while I may not be sold on the idea that life is a gift yet, I’m also pragmatic: “Well, you’re here. Tough shit. It’d be a real shame to not make use of what you have, because that’s all there is.”
If I had the answers already and a means to see them out, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this.
