If you think that being a single person will somehow afford you more time, you ought to forego being single. No sense in setting yourself up for disappointment. I learned this through experience. I’m learning a lot of things through this new life. With any luck some of it will help someone else down the road.
One of the first thing I learned about was laundry. It takes a long time to get it done. I’m not talking about the folding and such. I merely speak of the washing and drying. We’re talking almost two hours and if you let the stuff sit in the dryer for too long then it gets wrinkled, which means more time ironing half a dozen tee shirts (Yes, I iron them if I really have to).
No one tells you that. No one tells you about the loneliness either.
At night the walls close in on you and you start to think about the darkness as a state of being, even a future. There is sound and light available if you could just turn on the TV and climb down that rabbit hole into forgetting about the facts; forgetting that this big house has no value if its just you and that you can’t live your life inhaling in between the moments that you have your boys.
There has to be more. There has to be more time, more meaning, more opportunity to climb down the rabbit holes of your own making; to embrace what you thought could be as opposed to what is.
What is is empty nights and a sort of misery that only happens when you are waiting for your life to start again. Or end. Either option seems a possibility in the darkness. Buddha suggested, “The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.” On the other hand loving yourself is core to the philosophy of Buddhism. The trick then is to love yourself through the darkness and the doubt and the wonder of what tomorrow will be and not to worry if it will be as empty as the night.
It can’t be.
Some Thoughts:
- While watching Thor: The Dark World recently I considered writing a spot of fan fiction that focused on the forgotten bits of the major fight scene. I wanted to call the piece ‘Claims’ and write about the handful of cars that were shot through a portal to another world. Those cars belong to someone and those people probably would file a claim…
- There is going to be an Independence Day 2.
- I get the distinct feeling people find me melancholy. This is only a little bit true.
- 1801 was the year the U.S. house chose Jefferson over Aaron Burr. He’ll become famous (as I’ll discuss in a few days) as the answer to a trivia question in a Got Milk? commercial. he was famous before that, of course, but that commercial was the stuff.
- 1801 was when Kentucky outlawed dueling. Important to the story to be told in #4… It was also the year of the first U.S. foreign war–the Barbary War.