As I have said many times here, this is a life blog.   Nothing more or less.   And sometimes life gets a little heavy.   Not to scare anyone…I’m fine now…really…but this first quarter was about the worst I have ever had.   Every winter it seems the period between Valentine’s Day and April just gets worse and worse.   But I think that’s over now.   As they say, what has been seen cannot be unseen.

I was in that chilly gray sky of the mind state all morning long yesterday.   I’d been that way for weeks and it just kept getting worse and worse.   Things went badly at work.   Things I should have been able to shrug off that I took to heart.   My co-workers were noticing, which only made it worse.   It fed on itself.   And it wasn’t about nothing either.   I’m 59 years old and never had a boyfriend.   You can’t walk that far in a life without time spent in the arms of an intimate other and not be damaged by it.   We were not made to be solitaries.   And I have been betrayed by people I trusted deeply.   Or maybe it was my congenital naivety.   People who look like that…

So it was deep in that feedback loop that I randomly chanced across that Hemingway quote in my Facebook stream and naturally the first thing that came to mind was a kind of despair that, no this isn’t why I feel the way I do because I have no courage.   I do not take risks, I run away from them.   Just ask Tico.   I am not a good man wounded, I was damaged goods to begin with.   Unworthy.   The child who was never meant to be.   And right then it was as if something tapped me on the shoulder and showed me something about myself that I’d never really looked at before, that through it all I have lived an honest life, because I never thought doing that was something to pat yourself on the back for.

A feeling for beauty…the courage to take risks… Yeah…actually I’ve taken a few haven’t I? And so it goes.   I felt right then as though a terrible fever was breaking.   Seriously, it was like a smothering curtain had been pulled off me and I felt alive again.   Life was good again.   The road forward clearer, and…enticing.   Then I remembered what had happened to Hemingway.   You try to be rational about things, but for a moment I felt like I’d been given a lift up, from a hand that would have known the need.