Coffee and Gauntlet Runs

It's been bitterly cold today.

I went out first thing this morning to get a coffee. This is a daily ritual I impose on myself so that I'm forced to interact with the known world. It's a mild inoculate against feeling too isolated or depressed.

But with one bite of the frost, all my plans for today were gone. Suddenly getting a good grocery shop done just wasn't that important. Except it is in the sense that I need to make my eating a bit healthier than it has been. I certainly haven't been eating crap. I just like to eat things I've made for myself. It's healthier and logistically speaking I know exactly what's been used. When I get into these modes of constantly bringing in or eating prepared food, however good the quality, I don't know. There's just something to it, some dynamic that doesn't feel good. I start to feel a bit hollowed out if I do it for too long.

But if I'm honest, I'm feeling down because I'm relishing the return to work tomorrow with the enthusiasm one reserves for a colonoscopy.  And I was contending with some dynamics in my personal life this weekend that once in a while reassert themselves and that frankly anger me because I have to deal with the sheer stupidity of it all.

That was the one great gift of clarity in 2016: the value of distancing myself and getting out of dysfunctional relationships of all kinds really hit home for me. It was as if I'd had time to detox and could, for the first time, really see things clearly and for what they were.

You're not going to like everyone and they won't like you. You can love someone and be incredibly incompatible with them. The moment you're a human being and mess up, not everyone will give you the benefit of the doubt or be able to articulate their needs or emotions like an adult. They'll just see a situation as being your fault.

I used to see these kind of circumstances as a judgement on me of some kind. I've just come to realize it's just life. In the end people do what they want to do and see things the way they want to see them.

But here's another interesting thing, that again, wasn't clear to me until I experienced it.  Yesterday I was listening to a BBC interview with George Michael from 2007/2008 and at one point the interviewer asked him how he got back to writing music and recovering from drug abuse. Michael replied simply that he went through a long enough period where nothing bad happened. He had lost his first real love to AIDS, lost a bitter court battle with his record company and then his mother died - all in the span of three years. And for a time, he said, he just thought that life would always be that way, a miserable gauntlet run that would never end. But it did.

George Michael's observation hit me right in the gut because I realized that's where I'm at right now. It's why I've been feeling more, for lack of a better word, normal than I have in ages. Enough time has passed where nothing bad, really bad, has happened. No pets or people have died. No major relationship has ended. No job has been lost multiple times. Life is just life, variant but manageable.

And it's become clear to me in the settling of all this dust that for a while, I just had to put one foot in front of the other and keep going. Being able to remain upright was all I had going for me and that was simply the best I could do. 

So I can think about work tomorrow and feel bummed out about it. But I'm frustrated, not overwhelmed. I don't feel anymore that my current situation is going to be my whole life or that hurtful or annoying situations with people are an indefinite circumstance.  God only knows that more losses are coming as I get older. But I can't help but feel that if I keep going, work hard and have a modicum of faith in myself that some really great things are going to happen as well.

Because as much as I've typed a sentence of that ilk in the past, I actually believe it this time.