I am afraid, people, you will have to endure yet another meandering, self-helpy-sounding musing on life, as this tends to be where my mind is at lately. Today's thoughts seem to be a new convergence of the “Housekeeping” quote/themes and my trail analogies...

“Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été”
Translation: “In the depth of winter, I discovered within me an invincible summer.”- Albert Camus

Thinking over the subject of the previous blog entry this beautiful summer day, I headed to Tennessee Valley for a hike down to the ocean. Filled with an inexplicable joy, I was playing my music with the windows open, and forgot myself, singing along with gusto at the top of my lungs. Looked over at a stoplight to see a car full of people smiling at me, thoroughly amused (and here, I’ll throw in a bonus Camus quote, just cause I like it and it fits: “Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”-Camus). I could not stop laughing at my own exuberance and how I must have looked. Until, literally in the midst of my embarrassed laughter, a line in the music suddenly, without warning, choked me up. Didn’t see it coming at all, and was baffled by my response. The line was “she’s not coming back”, silly actually, and I realized as I backpedaled through the sequence of the emotion in those couple of minutes that the mixture of happiness and sadness is a heightened sense of the necessity of a loss to receive again, and to have emptiness in order to be filled anew. In feeling a new optimism for life, in feeling me inside again, feeling a desire and drive inside of me, it means that another part of me, a former version of me, has truly died, not just cognitively, but now emotionally too, which is the final nail in a painstakingly crafted coffin. It’s a loss. And a gain. And no, she’s not coming back.

 

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