While reading about a great omelet which I found from a link in my morning reading about restaurant menus, I found this idea in an article about Newark and terrorism and the Sopranos.
“On Sunday’s ‘The Sopranos,’ Tony stayed up one night channel-surfing. This is not unusual for Tony. His sins keep him awake. Or rather a perplexing question about his sins: Why has the committing of them become so joyless? Why don’t they yield happiness?”
Now none of these has anything to do with this idea, and why it somehow struck a chord in my head. But I find more and more, that strange little statements, thoughts, song lyrics, about things totally unrelated to my situation and daily routines, have strange connections to feelings and emotions that I have these days.
For this particular statement in my case has nothing to do with the Sopranos, I admit I have never seen the show, and nothing to do with my sins. It has to do with life, and love, and my daily struggles with self identity.
Unlike Tony, instead of my sins, I struggle now with my emotions, my feelings of affection for my daughter’s mother, my wife. They are something that that are with me every day. I still awake every day with love in my heart for their mother. But now even writing that sentence and saying “my wife” makes me realize the feeling Tony Soprano feels, why does this feel so joyless, why doesn’t it yield happiness?
I know the answers but I still have to ponder these questions. I have to analyze my condition and my progress through this process of healing. Who would have thought that an injury that is so invisible to the people I will meet, can be so painful, and difficult to heal. The realization that this injury doesn’t heal on it’s own is one that puts the future in such a different light. I don’t know how to describe the realization that I am going to have to work so hard each and every day to ‘heal myself’. ‘It’ won’t heal on ‘it’s’ own, I have to work to heal. I have to do the things I do each day, and work through the problems I have, the emotions I feel, and understand the reasons and learn to let the emotions happen and try to find ways to let those emotions change and shift somehow and become new emotions new feelings.
Almost half my lifetime was spent feeling those ‘old’ emotions. They were fantastic emotions. Feelings and thoughts and ways of daily life that in some ways are still here but in others are gone, and can’t ever be brought back again. I am certain that it will take time for those emotions to change. I say change, as I know that they will never go away, but somehow age gracefully like we expected our lives to do, as new emotions and feelings start to accumulate and join those ‘old’ emotions in the memory banks of my mind and soul.