A Sometimes Sadness

Robert,

What do we do about the sometimes sadness?  It’s the same one that glimmers pleasantly around the edge of a memory or indecision in a smiling circumstance or the shine of a day so perfect you understand beautifully that you cannot possess it.  It’s the same one too, though, that sometimes floods in with a memory, filling surprising corners well beyond the visions or charm of the thought. A flood of overbearing sentiment.  It can be a seizure, like a binding.  It can be a saturated weight, a quiet sickness.  It can be a profound, slow well that only gets expressed outwardly as a slight distraction of thoughts.

Is it from not being in adventure?  Is it, this time, from being somewhere familiar in ways you had stepped away from, a deeper familiarity than you had credited the place with?  Is it from loss, specifically loss you have chosen, that your body some days cannot reconcile, can’t conceive?  Is it anticipation?  Is it boredom?  Is it change – the deeper, massive steps that lag behind the plane tickets purchased and jobs chosen and people that you miss terribly or are about to?  Is it uncertainty?  Loneliness?  More liquor, sugar and dairy than usual?

I am trying to be better about letting it be, and not trying to “fix” it – an odd habit indeed for any emotion, but one I’ve spent years attempting and failing at.  Fixing.  The other side of that effort may be trying to not give into it too much (which may be what I’m doing right now…doubtful, though…); not let it take over activity, but let it be as it still sits or still churns.  Today I’m so grateful for painting a bathroom and driving through the country to an orchard catching up with my sister, for both of those have enough space to hold sadness that has arrived unexpectedly with the sweep in of the fall chill, particularly in Milwaukee, where it turns out I have deeply planted memories of change and pleasant self-confrontation that I did not know would be waiting with such weighted colors in me during this other turn in my life that I am still striving to see in its fullness as I stand at its threshold.

It may be the overwhelm of change meeting the hibernation surge of autumn.  The crispness and beige of fall that I love so much has great heaviness, sudden and pervasive, right now.

So this is also part of adventure.

With great admiration,

Tim