Some Monday morning ramblings in the middle of the week. I guess I’m continually behind 🙂
I was reading about John Perry Barlow’s latest sadness at losing yet another friend. There was a time when hearing about other people who have suffered loss would put me into a downward spiral of my own. Now I feel sad about how the ones who so loved, will now feel the pain and sorrow, but I don’t re-live that pain and sorrow myself as much as I used to.
I think part of that is because of a heightened sense of emotion in the first few years. Most of it is the emotions of loss, sadness, and sorrow. The level of emotion is similar to the strong emotions I sometimes feel when I wake suddenly from a dream and I still feel the joy, fear, or sadness I was experiencing in my dream. Imagine having that heightened sense of emotion, all the time. Every waking hour. It is almost as if my emotional world has been turned upside down, and when I’m awake I have all these intense emotions but when I sleep I don’t. I am begining to look forward to a time where the heightened emotions are joy, and happiness.
One of those strong emotions is the sadness for my daughters and the perception of the things that they have lost, the future with their mother that they won’t have. After a time I have begun to realize that we have all lost more than anyone can measure, but that doesn’t mean that the future is destined to be spent focused at every moment on what they don’t have.
In the comments on Barlow’s site someone said: “This is a transcendent place and if you can sit still in the beauty and pain, you can learn how to be free.” This reminds me that I can’t help focus on time right now. I have several deadlines coming up (God there must be a better word than that) and it seems that there isn’t any time to get things done. There is no time to “sit still”. I guess there is a desire to speed up the process, to get beyond the pain and on to the beauty and if I only had more time I could do that.
Barlow also talked recently about a topic that is becoming a focus in my life. My health. My focus has been on making sure that I have prepared enough for the girls to get through college. I think I have an idea that if I can get them through college then they will be prepared enough to survive on thier own. I want to be able to do the things I need to do to make sure I take care of myself. Barlow is getting a gift that cannot be measured. Even if I could find someone to give me all the tests, and treatments and coaching etc, when would I have the time to do any of that? It’s hard enough to find the time, or more accurately the energy, to do the treadmill for 20 minutes a day.
One of the things I have learned is that there is nothing more precious than time.
“These precious days we live through
Thrown away like tissue
I wish that I could give you all the time in the world”
If there was a Lottery for time I would be buying tickets every week.