A Moment of Reflection at the End of the Day

One day has rolled into another. There is a recognizable rhythm to my days now. And things on which I must focus... things to do, people to call, dinner to make... staying focused on finding a job. With Mom starting to fade now, we have to stop by more often to help her deal with situations she can no longer manage on her own. Today was a busy day, but I felt that it was a productive day, too. It is a very pleasant feeling to know that with each new day, I am becoming yet a little more functional once again. The times of craziness and chaos are finally coming to an end.

My life is now punctuated with a welcome predictability. And a remembrance of things of I had momentarily forgotten. And I have added a few bits of knowledge to my accumulated store of hard won wisdom.

After a really tumultuous five or six years, I have learned that one of the hardest things that I have had to do is to let go of relationships and of things which I really thought I couldn't live without.

I reluctantly had to let a cherished relationship just fade away, because it was one of those chance things that happen to us in life that have a very short half-life. Someone comes into our lives at a critical point in time and the two of us help each other to survive a difficult moment. And the difficult moment passes. When that happens, that relationship became awkward and painful... that relationship had no chance to make it after the crisis in both our lives had passed. I went one direction. She went another. Nothing is quite so painful as to watch something very precious wither and die. But then, over time the pain has diminished and now I can accept that this is the way it has to be. What is truly strange to me is that as hard as I might try now, I can no longer what her face looks like. The few things that I do remember of the time we spent together is becoming a distant memory, the stuff of something I must have dreamed or something. Now I realize that this forgetting is a godsend because I have to live in the present moment and holding too tenaciously onto that memory no longer serves any purpose now that I have moved on.

Marilyn and I are getting rid of things we have held onto for years. However, doing that is becoming easier as we are focusing on living our lives more fully rather than having to constantly deal with what to do with the things we have acquired over the years. "Holding on to our treasures" and "figuring out how to pay for those 'precious' treasures" sucked up an awful amount of our time. We just realized just how much time we squandered in acquiring and keeping these things. Marilyn and I now realize that living our lives fully is more important than acquiring things so that we can look good or feel good. Even knowing this, however, we still find it very difficult to part with some of the miscellaneous things we have acquired over the years. In fact, letting go of some these objects can be downright painful, at least until they are gone. And then quickly enough we forget about them and we move on.

Letting go of cherished beliefs is another matter entirely. I will write about this matter in greater detail at another time. I built my whole existence on a set of beliefs about how the world worked and a set of expectations about what my life was going to be all about. For me, being forced to revise my view of the world and to rethink the basic assumptions about my life was excruciatingly difficult. I had to go through eighteen months of painful therapy to accomplish this feat. Thankfully, it was something I desperately wanted to do, otherwise I would have failed in my attempt to turn my life around.

Today, I also remembered that old saw that we either have nothing on our agenda or we have too many things to do and not enough time to get everything done. There never seems to be a middle ground.

Over the last three years, I cleared the decks. I jettisoned a lot of unnecessary baggage I no longer wanted to carry around with me. For awhile I had a lot of time on my hands. Momentarily there was no structure to my life. Soon, I wasn't going to have a job. For better or worse, where we work and what we do defines us and serves a critical support beam in the structure of our lives. On New Years Eve, my job ended and suddenly I really had a lot of time on my hands. Too many changes had taken place in my life in a very short period of time. I was thrown completely off balance for a time.

In trying to find my way back home, I learned to live my life one day at a time. When life is dishing out crap, the only thing I can effectively do is just hold on as best I can, until I can get a handle on the situation. So I just began to take things one hour at a time... one day at a time. Now things have come full circle. I am once again reminded that things go around and then come back around full circle. We go through these cycles of difficult times to good times and back. I am now living in better times. I plan to savor the moment because I am fully aware that my situation can change for the worse in a heartbeat.

I really feel a bit strange right now. I am relatively relaxed... serene... at peace with myself and my family and with the world. I am even at peace with my Mother, who can drive even the most patient person to absolute distraction. I have not enjoyed this very pleasant state of mind for a very long time and I am really unaccustomed to this luxury. However, I like feeling this way very much. More of the same, I say.

This is the end of my day and this is how things are playing out in my neck of the woods. Thanks for stopping by.

Kindest regards,

Howard Fireman
Houston, Texas
USA



When I was rushing about at a