Reflections

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If I could summarize my life I would say it’s been this meandering search for happiness. This is probably everyone’s ultimate goal. I’ve invested a lot of time trying to find happiness in relationships, and that form of happiness appears to be fleeting and temporary. Apparently, you must find your happiness and contentment from within. It’s now occurring to me that maybe I’m simply not a happy person. For one thing, I’m way too idealistic. I actually care about the state of our environment and human civilization. Our dying environment and the collapse of American democracy keeps me constantly sad.

My search for love is equally elusive. What may seem like a perfect, ideal relationship always appears to have fatal flaws. I’m a nice, loving guy, but something must be wrong with me somewhere inside. I’m beginning to ask, “What’s wrong with me?"

The Final Stretch

Half of me wants to just say “done” and give up on women, career aspirations, social life. That half just wants to focus on house projects, my family, and holding onto my job. I tried to be an environmental and political activist. I tried to be a Christian church leader. I tried to be a corporate warrior. But there’s always some demon inside of me that keeps me frustrated and cynical.

The other half wants to find the woman of my dreams, get married, travel, and enjoy the sunset years. But relationships are so complicated and there is a certain stress to them that eventually wears me out.

Love

When I was in college I fell in love with a girl and loved her so intensely. She dropped me for another guy, and she did not handle it well at all. She simply disappeared. Little did I know the amount of lifetime damage that would have on me, and how it would affect me in my future relationships. If your heart is broken bad enough, and if you are a dreamy, romantic poet at heart like me, then that is it. That’s it for me.

Pain

It’s all around me and it’s there every day, and I can never escape it. First, there is the pain of human violence — the mass shootings and terrorism. Second, there is the pain of all the broken relationships all around me. Some of these involved me, and I try to fix them, and others are beyond my control. The whole human experience is about relationships, breaking them, building new ones, etc… I suppose it’s part of being human.

The Point of This

I could just be a hermit, rarely leaving my house. I can just sit around, supporting my children, maintaining my health, caring for my pets, but mainly just watching the clock as I get old and fade away. I fought the good fight and I am tired. I wouldn’t mind just living in a rented room and just blogging and reading books. I know few people will ever read my blog posts, and even fewer will ever care. Writing is simply a form of therapy. I actually ever even read my own posts. Once written, they just sit there in the darkness of cyberspace. There, they will sit until the Internet crashes.

The End