"...Looking for my way back home again..."

I just sent off an email to a good friend of mine.

I talked to him about how our past precedes us as we begin each new day. And our past, the recollection of our successes and/or failures, stick in the minds of the people who have known us along the way. I suspect that in their minds my life has come off as a bit underwhelming. I suspect that I will be spending the rest of my life trying to come from behind to overcome in their minds their perception of who I am and what I have accomplished in my life.

I always keep in mind, that no matter how successful a person has been, no one ever cuts that person any slack. We are as good as what we are doing today. Period.

I have struggled for as long as I can remember to figure out where I want to take my life. Just this moment, I believe that I know a part of the answer to that question. I want to take myself to a place and time where I can feel that my life is stable and solid and that there is a positive consistency to it... where the people who know me will have an expectation that the things I set out to do seem to have merit and that I will succeed, because of who I have become. I want to reach a time and place where the people I truly care about will have higher expectations for me than they do now. Certainly, that will be something I will have to earn. But that is the place and and time to which I want to go... a place and time I want to call home.

I was listening to a Debbie Friedman album, the Carnegie Concert album. One track, titled "Save a life and you will save the world" has just finished playing.

I caught the phrase, "... looking for my way back home again..."

I think that is what I am doing now. But I wish the hell I knew where "home" is. I know it isn't a destination marked on any on any map I know of. It is a spot on the road somewhere ahead of me in the future. It would be nice to say to myself, with certainty, "I will know the place when I get there."

If I get there... This is one of those moments I have to stop myself and say to myself, "All things being equal, you will get there. Just take things one day at a time, and then one day, you will reach that place. One of these days. Just don't give up hope."

If only I knew with a profound certainty that, for me, there is such a place as "my home," then maybe I wouldn't have the uneasy feeling that I am still just drifting from one day to the next, without any sure sense of even my next destination.