So it's been an amazing summer already and it's barely July. Epic motorcycling, long weekends on the island, fun OSHA-violating work-like play, social justice for kids at the office, loving, creative fella, awesome roommate, incredible friends, more laughs than I can count. Every time I look around I realize just how lucky I am and how much I'm growing in my surroundings. I'm incredibly happy and satisfied in ways I never thought I could be, and I'm excited and energized about the adventures ahead.
That being said, it's been a rough couple of years for me. It's been a hell of a struggle to get from emotional ground zero to where I am now. While I open my head and heart to the world I must confess to being gunshy. I'm afraid that I will get to Burning Man, as prepared as possible to have my mind blown in the way only Black Rock City can, and discover that I am too fragile. That a wildfire will be unleashed and I'll be broken down in depths of anguish and have to begin again. I'm afraid that I'll spend the rest of the event crying and wishing I hadn't come. I'm afraid that I will be jumped by some unforeseen something-- disillusion? Regret?-- about the house. I'm afraid that I'm like a victim I am returning to the scene of the accident, thinking this is what I was doing when it all went to hell, this must be what I need to be doing. Right?
I'm afraid of these things because I've dealt with them before. I've known my mind to hide things from me, like memories of my Father. For a long time a lot of my teenage years with him were simply inaccesible to me. I used to worry that I couldn't remember and wouldn't ever again, but then one day I did remember. I remembered and the emotional impact of it broke over me like a wave, and I wept. I've pushed through time operating on terribly little mental capability. Only in retrospect did I see how, like iron eaten by rust, I was critically failing and it's kind of a miracle I didn't break down altogether. Perhaps my lesson is that I have and will weather this adversity, and what I aspire to is strength and wit enough to be graceful when it inevitably comes.
I'm also coming to realize that letting go isn't a milestone, at least not at first. Letting go means letting the balloon string of thought for someone or something else go over and over and over, every time you see something they might have liked or see someone they know or want to share a thought or feeling with them or simply miss the person that you are were when you were with them. Over and over and over, and I guess eventually you hope that over time the moments where you are required to conciously let go of them will become fewer and far between, and faded enough not to color your being anymore.
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'And the day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom'- Anaïs Nin