Turn and face the strange…

Changes.

My brother Steve and I have always been big fans of the saying “people never really change” – the who tiger don’t change his stripes bit, you see. I think there is some validity to this – we learn and perhaps choose to alter our behaviors, but there is something to be said for the nature of who we might be. The thing is a lot of us may never figure that out. I spent a lot of my life thinking I really knew a lot of that, only to find recently that I really didn’t know that much at all. So, over the past few months I’ve been going through quite a bit of change in behaviors, but also attempting to return to the knowledge of who I might really be. There’s a bit of evidence on here and none of this probably would have begun actually if I hadn’t come to a very clear view of who I was certainly not.

So now, with months of intense introspection, consideration and study I’m coming closer than I have been since about three years or so ago when a fiery young girl walked into my life at around two in the morning on a summer night. I was close then, but not near where I am today – and there is still very far to go. Of course, this is easy to nod along with – knowing who you are really is a trick question – it changes over time. At the same time however, a lot of this is behaviors we develop – some going back to far, so deep that looking in them is looking into Nietzche’s Abyss – the terror is often when it really is yourself you see staring back. There’s a line from Oh, the Places You’ll Go! That has some of the greatest relevance to life I’ve ever known – well that’s the whole book – but it goes like this:

“I’m afraid that some times
you’ll play lonely games too.
Games you can’t win
’cause you’ll play against you.

All Alone!
Whether you like it or not,
Alone will be something
you’ll be quite a lot.

And when you’re alone, there’s a very good chance
you’ll meet things that scare you right out of your pants.
There are some, down the road between hither and yon,
that can scare you so much you won’t want to go on.”

That’s where it stops for a lot of people and that’s where it stopped for me in a lot of ways a very long time ago; longer by far than the first years I read that book to my own son before my daughter was yet born. There’s a lot of differences in perception that come with it, but there is more peace, particularly for the mind – which is something generally unknown to someone like me. There can be peace even in a mind such as mine, but the peace comes in moving within the chaos and laughing with it, rather than becoming lost and wondering why you just can’t do things normal people can do – I can do them, and more likely, just not in the same way. I used to look at the end of a day, knowing I wouldn’t be sleeping much, and wonder where the hell it went, why I didn’t get anything done, why I didn’t spend the time with the kids I wanted, why the woman I loved and I argued about something rediculously petty, because if we didn’t we might have said nothing at all. Everyday I still think about a lot of things I did not complete and laugh at the fact that many of them I may likely never complete – but I told my kids how happy they make me and how much I love them – I read to them, I accomplished many simple tasks I never could get myself credit for before and moved forward. I learned, about myself, about others, about music, about life, about love. All of these things I did in a day, all with a mind that spent the whole day running a thousand thoughts a second.

There’s a very good chance I may never sleep regularly, but the few hours I sleep are well enough. While there are ups and downs, there is a harmony in the chaos I live with, past and present, and the future seems less of a worry than it once did. I think I’ll end there before I elaborate and repeat myself further

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