It’s been a hot minute.
It’s three and a half years since I posted anything to this blog. To this receptacle I had intended to dump all my various thoughts, inspirations and fears into.
But life intercedes. Events occur. Media distracts. Work disrupts. People flow in and out like the tide. Thoughts get tangled in the net of the now and it takes every effort to sort them out, much less commit them to electronic paper.
Life is chaos.
Things happen. Details change. Choices made.
Every minute. Every hour. Every day.
Constantly.
The end of December is a time of introspection for many of us, on both a personal level and also of the world at large. We look at all our wonderful times of the past year: the accomplishments we made, the places and events we experienced, and the magnificent people we’ve shared them all with. We also throw a cautious glance at the moments that were not as wonderful – the painful instances and losses we had to endure – in the hopes that there was some significance to the suffering. We then take our pencils out and start jotting down our new “resolutions”… what we will do more of, do less of, or simply do better in the coming year ahead.
This past year was a difficult one for me. Everything seemed like it was going so well as the year began. So many of the goals I had set out for myself those decades past were finally falling in line. I felt relaxed; I felt happy. I was ready to tackle the world…. THIS WOULD BE MY YEAR.
Disappointment brings up a whole cacophony of emotions. Anger, sorrow, fear… each one twisting around inside of you like a wrestling match for control of your inner psyche.
I’ve had to deal with disappointment quite a lot this year, and last week brought some more to my doorstep. A few months ago I chose to reestablish a relationship with my ex-fiancé Ellen. I ignored all of my better judgment, hoped for a miracle, and on Thursday got burned to a brittle crisp.
Earlier this month I went to see the final dress rehearsal of “Evita” at Circle Theatre. My friend Todd Lewis is playing Juan Perón in the wonderful production, but starring as Evita is Jolene Frankey, a woman I was doing a show with exactly twenty years ago. She was but a little girl in that show, and now she’s a grown woman, a mother and a superb singer and performer. To me it does not feel like that much time has passed… it’s startling. (Oh, and Todd isn’t so bad, either.)
It brought my thoughts since then back to that time. It was a critical point in my life. Through those five years of experiences I was able to enjoy life and conquer some of my innermost demons… but it came to an abrupt, painful end.
Today I turn 47 years old. It’s been turning over in my head since I got up this morning. FORTY-SEVEN.
That seems unfathomable. How did this number sneak up on me so surreptitiously?
When you are young and primed for your life to begin, a number like that can seem a LONG way off. You have dreams and ambitions as wide as the sky… and SURELY you have all the time in the world to make your conquests.
It’s a completely different viewpoint now. Suddenly you realize that there’s a deadline to all of these goals. The finish line seems just as distant, and you’re quickly running out of breath.
Does everyone feel this growing sense of urgency as they get older, or is it just me?
It’s been over a month since my last blog post. During that time I’d been working on a post that, while started with good intentions, got too buried within its own subject matter. Work and family was more of the focus over the last five weeks, and some personal issues kept shattering my focus on the material I had set out to create. In the end, I decided to table the post and just write something here more “stream of consciousness”.
Lately, it’s been one day at a time for me. Life got quite a bit smaller after losing both my cat and my girlfriend of 2 ½ years simultaneously. Other issues happened at about the same time both personally and professionally that, all taken together, knocked me down several rungs of the ladder. If I truly believed in luck, I would have concluded that I’ve had nothing but a bad run of it since New Year’s Day. So I make it through each day by sticking with my recently developed routines and dealing with each day’s challenges as they come.
