you build your fire into an open wound/you want us to feel better
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Nice quiet nite here in Saratoga, everybody just chilling doing their own thing. Catching up on email, random life, listening to some old Guided By Voices and just kinda happy about it all. Talking with one of the guys I work with here, he likes to say "I used to be so angry when I was younger" and then give some example to back this up, and it's true, he was a pretty pissed off guy. And I know I was for a long time too, but my hostility didn't kick in until I was older, but I think it was always there, it's just that it didn't manifest itself until given proper reason. I also think I tended to fuel it regularly because of work and life decisions, so it was always there, festering and growing.
But I guess age and perspective, and realizing that carrying the weight of anger and frustration around regardless of locale and the people around you is kind of pointless, and drags you and everyone else around you down. And I wish that it was one of those epiphany type things, where it just occurred to me one night and then the next day everything was fine.
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Oddly, that kind of thing has happened a few times for me, and the best, earliest instance I can recall is how, when I was seven, I was coming home from school every day with a detention slip, and having to get it signed by my dad, and then spending lunch break or even time after school sitting at my desk and doing nothing. Until, amazingly, I realized how stupid I was being, and how if I would just stop doing the idiocy that I was doing, I could spend lunch break outside playing instead of inside, wondering about what I'm missing. And overnight it just clicked.
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Anyway, I wish it was one of those things that went away overnight, and it's not to say that it can't come back, but I'm finding it's a hell of a lot easier to live life when I don't have this lingering resentment and anger just dragging me down day after day. And it's funny how my perspective and just overall approach to every day and moment has changed, simply because I made this conscious decision nearly two years ago, and it seems like every day a bit more fades into the distance.
It's about forgiveness, but also acceptance, and I think that the harder of the two to fully grasp and understand is the latter, not the former. I've always, I think to my personal detriment, been able to forgive pretty easily, but moving beyond that and accepting that whatever thing happened has always been a lot harder to deal with. Let it go, ya know? But I've always found it easier to say than to actually put into practice. Even when I thought I was past it, over it, even somehow convinced myself that I was done even thinking about it, some part of my psyche just continued to hold on, because that dark corner of my brain knew that I thought I needed it.
But I don't. My chef from a number of years back used to refer to me as his "angry young man", and I always laughed it off (we were in Styx radio territory then) because I thought it was sarcasm at most...but it's funny how, looking back, it was so incredibly true.
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I learned to let go, finally. Accept the idiocy of life, especially those things that you have absolutely no control over whatsoever, and move on. And it's nice, being able to just shrug off the yoke of anger and hostility and resentment after all these years, because it really does feel like I'm walking lighter, straighter, perhaps even with purpose again after just faking it. Almost feel like I have feeling again, or maybe empathy is the proper word? It's not that I didn't care about my fellow man, it's just that it seemed out of a sense of duty and being the right thing to do rather than a sincere sense of connection and actually caring about the situation/person/whatever.
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Still a work in progress, but at least there has been progress. Seems like years since I've done anything other than move forward or backward in my profession, rather than actually progress as a person.
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Guided By Voices, Isolation Drills/Twilight Campfighter
