love and mercy thats what you need tonight

Everything exists in flashes these days. Feelings and moments, long gone, pass before me like fish in a tank. Sometimes at night, listening to the wrong song at the wrong moment, I find myself deep in the grips of nostalgia. I have to turn all of my pictures over. It does me no good to remember the good times, or to remember the times that I regret. Although, as I get older, my regrets seem to fade into the background. They are still there, but with the passage of time you realize that there is nothing you can do to change the past, and that there is no money in dwelling on things that you have no power to change. 

I have no idea what it is that keeps me awake at night. The problem is that everything is so formless in my mind. Mostly when people are dealing with something, it is concrete. There was the girl that got away, the friendship that was broken, the traumatic incident that you can’t seem to shake. Like most people, I have experienced all of that, but none of it sticks in my mind as something worth being worked up over any longer. There is no one person in my past that I regret not being with today, and while I wish some friendships hadn’t been broken, you have to go on believing that people will come back to you when they will, or else they wont, and in the long run it doesn’t matter anyway. If anything, what bothers me the most is just the solid accumulation over the years of missed opportunities, opportunities for growth and for meaningful experiences that I let slip through my fingers. It is like there is this vision in my head of what life could be, and since the reality constantly falls short of that vision, I despair. Although that may be too strong of a word. 

Maybe I just need to accept my melancholia as the primary symptom of who I am. You have to think you are this way or that way for a reason. Those of us who believe in God think that there is a purpose for our life beyond procreation, beyond the biological imperative. We may be foolish to believe that, but it gives us hope for something more meaningful than simply toiling day in and day out until finally we are in the dirt and forgotten. So who I am is a gift, in a sense, that allows me to bring to others something that they may lack. And in turn they offer me something that I lack, and so on and so forth. The funny part is that usually I am fairly happy, or at least content. Life is interesting enough most of the time, and there are a lot of good times and opportunities for growth. I know this note is unusually direct, but it is that sort of night. 

Anyway, I am sorry that I have been so withdrawn from the world around me the past year or so. I know, and have known for a long time, that the only important thing I can do in this life is to give to those around me, and I haven’t been very intentional in that area lately. I haven’t been a good friend to a lot of people, and there have been countless ways that I could have reached out to people, even strangers, and I have passed them by. I am not by any means promising to wake up tomorrow and pull an Ebeneezer Scrooge, but perhaps I can start down that road. I am not worried about timing. This is a journey, and it will unfold at its own speed.