So how many times do I have to wake up? It seems as though every time I turn around I am becoming acutely aware of something that I had previously been oblivious to. In my life I have spent a great deal of time avoiding the actual experience in an effort to save those moments for when I am the person that can truly appreciate them. For as long as I care to remember, that person was Dana, and while I was stuck living as Dale, everything in the experience had a gray cloud looming over it.
In retrospect, was this the best way to handle my life? I mean would I have proven more productive as a person if I had just chosen to experience life as me, whatever me might be at the moment? I don’t really know, and as I reflect upon the moments that I want to revisit and experience though the “under renovation” version of myself I wonder if maybe I shouldn’t wait for the “Grand Reopening”. I really hate to think that I could have spent, and will continue to spend so much of my life putting off things that I just want to truly experience in the hopes that those moments will somehow be better though the clarity of being at one with myself and my surroundings.
Recently, I was looking though some old pictures of a hike that I once took. Within those pictures of a scrawny college aged boy splayed out upon rocks overlooking a river, I find memories so vivid that they may as well have been made yesterday. For a moment at a time I am transported back to that rock, I can feel the cold granite, then back to here and now, and then the sound of the rushing water floods my imagination. The gurgling and splashing as the water leaps up the rocks at me, every once in a while a drop or two breaks free as if weightless and lands on my bare arm, and then back to staring at the picture. The experience that I wanted so badly to not have is with me, I can smell the clean air, and I can even picture the sweetgum leaves as they bristle with the energy of a warm summer breeze mixing with the cool rush above the water. So, in the effort to avoid the experiences entirely, did I manage to bottle them up and save them in pristine condition for later? Maybe despite my best efforts, I had in fact was unsuccessful at avoiding life entirely and did experience the moment in un-clouded clarity.
While moments from the picture seem crystal clear, there are moments in my life that while life changing to me, are only foggy snippets of the entire experience. Lets take for example paper marbling. Oddly enough, it is a medium/art that I truly love to do. I know this for a fact, It is chaos that somehow turns into a beautiful organization. I vividly remember the smell of the floating medium, and the way I felt when I pealed the first successful sheet from the medium but I can not tell you any of the specifics of the experience, including where I was or even what colors I chose to play with. Was I any less involved in the experience at the moment? Maybe I just catalogued it differently in my mind. Either way, somehow the two moments are similar in their effect in my life, yet somehow different.
What should I do?
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