Category — blogging

I stood in the middle of the bar and took a long sip from my drink, letting the vodka slip down my throat and start a slow, low fire throughout my stress-ravaged body. Just as I felt a month’s worth of tension start to slip out of my toes and fingertips, the General Manager of my sector at the Borg approached.

Are you okay? I know this was a hard day for you, do you want to talk a little? I’d like to know how you’re doing.

We had just executed a mass-layoff in my office, including most of my staff, and my knowledge of this impending doom preceded theirs by a little over a month. I had cried at the prep meeting, while terminating my Payables clerk, and with some coworkers after they were handed their pink slips. I cried all damn day, and only worried a little about my professional reputation.

I’m okay. I meant what I said earlier- this is the right thing for the business, it’s the right thing for those of us who remain- but that doesn’t make it any easier. I know that I’ve been able to look back on my darkest days six weeks, six months, six years down the road and I’ve had the solace of realizing that if I hadn’t faced that hardship, I wouldn’t be right here, and that’s always been a source of comfort to me. To be able to say of the hardest things that they helped make the best things in my life. I’m sad tonight for the people we let go, but more than anything, I just hope that they can look back later on and see that this ending was the beginning of something better.

A relieved smile spread from his eyes to his cheeks, and we chatted for a few minutes before someone cut in and I excused myself.

A few days shy of my thirty-second birthday, I still believe that. I can’t defend it, I can barely explain it, the best hope I have is to point to nature and say it is evidence to me of a higher order that we have not yet grasped in our knowledge of the universe.

If faith is an innate knowing, then this is mine, and I understand it in my bones.

I don’t know why bad things happen to good people, and I don’t know why some lives end so early or so unexpectedly. I understand that people hurt people because they hurt, but I don’t understand the cosmic value in so much pain. Perhaps there isn’t any at all, and I only seek to ascribe it some value to make peace with it somehow.

Since my earliest years of awareness, I’ve been called an old soul. Certainly, I’ve had a few encounters with strangers that were more recognition than introduction, and have always read between the lines without really realizing it. What that means is beyond any of us to understand, and I won’t do it the injustice of pinning it down. Those kinds of things are still magical to those of us that want to see them, and I suppose my biggest question for my coincidence and science friends is, simply:

Why wouldn’t you want to think that things happen for a reason, even if we don’t understand how or why?

I’m incredibly suspicious of anyone who doesn’t believe in something, one thing, anything that they can’t see.

Last night, I sat in the kitchen nook. The steam from my soup kissed my cheeks, and the faint smell of woodsmoke sat in the back of my throat. My thoughts drifted to my upcoming birthday and the annual reconciling of reality against my visions and dreams.

As always, my life looks nothing like what I ever imagined for myself. The people and experiences that filled the gap between my dreams and my defeats are both precious and priceless in their own right, and I choose to believe that they put me right here, right now, with this particular perspective. Any variation on my history would not have produced this moment, with these people, and my capacity to appreciate them.

You can argue with that all you want to, and I would relish the discussion.

What you can’t argue with is the sense of recognition and belonging that strikes deep and true, past my neurotic brain and my poor schizophrenic heart, straight into the marrow. It produces a warm calmness that whispers above all the noise of doubt and fear.

You belong here.

I can make a fairly compelling argument that the world is shrinking as fast as my gmail storage limit increases; tiny incremental changes that accumulate quietly until some event reveals it as a material amount. Where once I feared this, I’m proud to say now that I’ve built my life around it. When something seems impossible I turn it over to the same magic that’s already created more love and success than my heart can hold.

You never let me down, and that sensation of being so tenderly cradled by a community bursting with so much talent, skill, wisdom and passion sustains me in my darkest moments. The smallest acts of kindness are as precious as the grand gestures; not every mountain can be moved swiftly. Those of you that have spent years raising callouses on your hands one shovelful at a time have rightfully earned my undying loyalty.

If there exists one value that my parents instilled above all others, it was that we are put on this Earth to love each other while we’re here. When I expressed my gratitude to my father for all of their sacrifices, gladly made on my behalf, and my fear that I couldn’t ever reciprocate, his response carved deep grooves in my soul.

You know how you pay it back? You do for your sister, you do for your baby cousins, you take the help that comes your way with humble gratitude, and you pay it forward. Every chance you get to bring your resources to bear for someone else, you do that. That’s how you repay me, by starting the cycle over again.

My father never turned anyone down for a meal- it was a challenge for your Grandma sometimes, to stretch the menu for unexpected company. But he never let a soul leave that house hungry, you know, no matter who they were or what he had to share, and I’ve always tried to live that way, and I think that’s why I’ve always had support when I’ve needed it, because I’ve always given it when I possibly could.

So, if I have an opportunity to cook for you, to rework your resume, to show you some measure of comfort or ease of hardship, I’m delighted to do it. I consider it a blessed opportunity to put just a fraction of the love and concern I’ve received back out into the universe; a calling to honor what I’ve been given by sowing some hopeful seeds for another soul.

I’m not the girl that always keeps up as well as she should with personal correspondence and social visits. Despite my reputation otherwise, I don’t always have the right words to express how I feel about each of you personally. My introversion and mercurial emotional weather create artificial distance in many of my relationships; my thoughts and feelings are sometimes so loud that they drown out the voices of others, no matter how fierce my affection for you.

Please know that I hold you all in my heart, that your love and kindness are the stars in my night sky. Thought does not translate into communication near often enough, and I’m working on that, but I am always here, loving you and wishing you all the strength and peace that I’ve found in your friendship.

My love is a rock.

and as you’re searching for peace in your world,
you may find yourself spinning around and around and around,
while the pain you’ve endured only serves to make you surer
of the strength that you’ve found, and then

my love is a rock, an immovable force
anywhere that you are, my love is right here
with any tick of the clock life can change its course
but my love will not, my love is a rock

-reo speedwagon, “my love is a rock”