This is another night when I nearly didn’t write the ten minutes I’ve promised myself I would. At this point I feel like quitting on this small thing, this tiny piece of my day and my life would be a tacit admission on giving up on so much more. Tonight I was caught up in other ideas and emotions. I spent veterans day riding the soul roller coaster, thinking and feeling my way through the past and present.
I was fortunate enough to connect with an old friend and roommate today. It has been 15 years since we last sat face to face and seeing him after the debris of a decade and a half has piled up on the shores of my psyche was akin to watching the tide come in… Yes, I recognize the corny poetics at play here, but there is truth in the imagery. He and I spent time together all those years ago, before marriage, still in the womb of college, so really before we went out and faced life. Now, fifteen years removed we a essentially grown up versions of those people we were with the scars and the bark to prove it. I am not entirely happy with who I have become. I am in someways a better version of that younger me, yet in other ways I am not.
The message in all of that is keep working and growing and changing and evolving and becoming. The belief that a persons state of self is static feels false. We change and we twist ourselves into versions of ourselves to suit the needs of a time, a place, even people. I twisted all the time and continue to do so.
So the mission then is to recognize this ideal self and have the courage to build structures and persevere through the handwork of growing ever closer to the all important self-actualization…
Or some such drek.