Caterwauling

From the “the more things change, the more they stay the same” files:

Let it be said right away that things are working out exactly as they need to. Just because you wait a long time for something, though, doesn’t mean things stop being hard. But some things are better, too, and the balance just shifts a bit. It’s a matter of finding the *right* combination of what not-so-great-things you can live with and what you really want and need. And I’m finding that I think the not-so-hot stuff isn’t so bad and that those are factors I can either adjust or just accept. This is Good.

But the reason I started this entry and named it what I did is in reference to something funny that happened, even if only in my mind. The thing is, you can change your location, but the same “people” are there with you — they just have different names and faces. Someone came to talk to me yesterday, and he does the same thing and even looks like someone I knew in Pittsburgh. And I had one of those heart-attack-in-the-making moments. Why? Because I remembered the person who I met first — a person, in many ways, I had done wrong on a personal level. And it occurred to me that I had not lost the lessons I had learned so long ago, so I resolved to not get into that situation again, should opportunity ever arise. Not that it should, but again, my white-as-a-ghost moments usually make for my best introspective times.

In any event, I am a stress monkey right now. I have a lot of outstanding details and things out of my control in my life, and it’s killing me. But I am trying to regain my former inner Zen and remember that, sometimes, having no answer is better than having an answer that is just going to cause more grief. I know I have a looonnnng road ahead that involves fixing a lot of things gone awry before I can ever feel like I’ve gotten on track, but I really hope to look back and to be grateful that I was able to identify what went wrong and to have the opportunity to make things right.

I s’pose I fall victim to wondering “Why Me?” more often than not — like, why does everything have to be a struggle? Why do I hit 14 roadblocks in the same half-mile stretch when I see others sailing by with nary a pothole to try to avoid? I think we all feel that way, though. And maybe the lesson in temptation is that we have to realize that sure, we can have a little bit of pleasure while we’re feeling so much pain but, inevitably, that just becomes one more mess that we have to unravel. So it’s best to not even “go there” at all.

On iTunes: Anna Nalick, “Breathe”

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 22nd, 2005 at 11:11 AM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.