The girl who was chasing after herself

So a friend contacted me today. Some of you know her. Some of you know of her. One of you is her. Anyway in the course of whatever was going on, I managed to tell her something I had sworn t keep to myself. Even went so far as to say "I shouldn't say this, but...". As a rule, when you know you shouldn't say something, well, you shouldn't. So it goes.

Maybe she will understand. Maybe she'll get pissed off. Maybe she'll say, "My bad." It's hard to try to guess, so I won't. But it's out there and it will either be accepted or hurled back at me. I'm not so much socially awkward as I am somewhat unsubtle. It used to worry me some, but after all these years, I realize it's just the way I'm wired. Brain to blog, I can be downright eloquent. Brain to mouth, not so much.

Like I was telling her, I don't really do regrets. Things did is things did. So, more accurately, they are now experiences. Some good. Some bad. All passed and unalterable. So, as REM either said or should have said, I prefer to be where I am. Not where I could have been. Or should have been. Or ought to have been. I am here and it is now. Deal with it.

I read something once that stuck with me. It altered me. The man said, "Americans are the only people on earth that think they have a right to be happy. Everyone else knows that life is hard." I guess that dovetails nicely with the whole pursuit of happiness thing. I don't know. I know that I just decided I was going to be more satisfied. Or more content. Or less not happy. I'm not sure if I quantified what I decided so much as I just kind of nudged it on into being. I call it a sort of hippie mentality, but being child of the '60s and '70s that is my frame of reference. I might just be zen. Hard to tell. It's not that I don't care about things, just that I don't care a lot. Which is why, as you well know, I make a terribly bad social conservative. I just really don't care what other people do, as long as they don't do it to me.

I have a friend and we go fishing a lot. Sometimes we catch fish, often we don't. But we have fun and we hang out. He's the one who made me realize that really good friends don't even have to be doing anything to enjoy themselves. Sometimes we sit in the boat for close to an hour, our backs to each other, casting out, reeling in, and soaking up the quiet. Then he'll say something that makes me go hmmmm. Because, well because we talk about things. Last trip he said to me, "You know, when you married your first wife nobody could understand it. But I did. I knew exactly why y'all fit together. Now everybody understands why you married this one but, well for the life of me, I just don't get it. Why did you?" Made me go hmmmmm. Made me go hmmmm mostly because I didn't have a good answer for him. So I told him, "I don't know. But it's all good." A few minutes later he had that gator on the line. I still need to recount that story sometime.

So anyway, I have been thinking. Why do we need to decide who we are going to be? I mean, we are who we are going to be already. What we are really doing is wasting our time and energy on who we want to be, and that's a more elusive beast. But I think even that misses the real point. We are really chasing who we think we want to be. And that ain't never going to be. So pour a shot of your poison of choice and throw it back. Ahhhh....tasty. Like REM did say, and I know that they did, now stand in the place that you are. You are who the hell you are. So don't fight it, like it.

Anyway, I knew a girl who was chasing after herself for all of her life. No matter which direction she turned and no matter how hard she ran, she couldn't catch who she thought she knew she might should be. It made her meloncholy and the meloncholy made her sad. Her sad makes me sad because once she had a hippie's soul too.

What used to be is gone and what ought to be ought not to be so hard, out

Ramblin' Ed