My roommate in college, who also happens to be one of my dearest friends in the world, wrote me a note on a post-it one night and stuck it to my computer. When I read the note, I taped it down so that I would see it every day. It was during our senior year, we were still suffering each other in the dorms, and I was slowly but surely self-destructing between working, writing a thesis, and carrying a full coarse-load. To this day it surprises me that Suzannah put up with me for so long. Shout out, Suz.
By now you are asking yourself- and the computer- 'well.. what did the note say?'
'Forget Regret or Life is Yours to Waste.' My roomie... she sure does have a way with words.
I have been thinking about regrets lately. Quite a bit today because it is beautiful outside and I am only now remembering what it is like to experience and live in such beauty. This park season (my life as a ranger takes on strange schedules and time tables) has mostly been a battle to find a person in myself after losing... a lot of things. I have kept quiet (sometimes), raged and wept (sometimes) but have always always stayed protected. I patterned my day-to-day existence around isolation, providing myself with an insular life and building and rebuilding fortress-like walls around my heart, brain, and spirit. I do not regret any of this. I needed, and still desperately need, the quiet. I need peace to sort through this... this.
What I do regret is that I became a zombie. The isolation was complete. I was protected. I was alone. I still am alone to a degree that I believe most people would be uncomfortable with. What I regret the most is that I was absent. How can I possibly explain such a regret? I smelled the salty-brackish water of the sound today, coming back from a run, and remembered the beauty of nature. I stood in the sunlight at work today and felt warmth. These are things I did not experience- things I did not let myself experience- for such a long time. I feel such happiness to reintroduce myself to sensations- but such regret that I let so long pass without them. Such deep, weeping regret in soul area of me.
Some things cannot be helped. Sometimes we have to go away, all of us if we are totally honest. We have to, we need to, be absent. But when we come back, when we reenter the atmosphere of our worlds, our loves, our lives, it is such a bittersweet experience. Such a brilliantly and brutally bittersweet experience. Everything that was there before we left is still there but it is vivid and strong and beautiful in a way that makes us hurt impossibly and individually.
So yeah, I've been thinking about regrets today. I'm hoping to have fewer.
Cheers Friends. Take a deep breath, it's the Fall.
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