Yesterday is now where it belongs

Monday, July 4, 2011

I’ve been pacing my writing cage for days and days. The heart says I must write. The head says, “You ain’t got no funny story to tell.” The heart takes head’s advice and keeps to itself a little longer until it can’t take it anymore and wakes the head at night with an incessant pounding on the door of stories.

Life’s not always funny. Write anyway.

I’d like to say that the last 365 days has been “The Year of Magical Thinking,” but that was Joan Didion’s story and it was very different than mine.

And yes, I understand—in the big scheme of things, anything I relate to may pale in comparison to the really difficult lives being lived out by others. You matter.

What—and all I know for sure is my own truth, and because I’ve been given the privilege of sharing “my neck of the woods” with you the reader, the sack of stories I pace the cage with isn’t always about the size of my God-given rear end or the canine capers.

Sometimes it’s about stuff that might make you cry or make you angry. It might make you sad. It might make you think about what’s really important to you, what you have, what you don’t, want you want, what you don’t, or who you want in your life and who you don’t.

But the next few paragraphs aren’t written in pursuit of the latter. It’s just quite simply reality—and a slice of my life story that’s doesn’t end in chocolate.

I was officially divorced from Peter on May 17th and yet I hadn’t reached full acceptance of our failed marriage until last week and, strangely enough, while cutting my grass with my riding mower.

Cutting my grass had been hell until last week because while “Big John” did all the work over the two or three hours it took to mow this big yard, my mind would get sucked into the dark vortex of wandering thoughts of stewing and suffering about all the reasons why he had chosen a life that didn’t include me.

By the time I was done mowing, I’d be reduced to nothing but a drained soul with no possibility or hope—and for someone with a great passion for landscaping and for this old homestead, this mind ritual I put myself through was grave business.

Then just last week some three hours into cutting my grass I suddenly realized my mind was quiet and content and I knew right then that I had reached a milestone in my new beginnings.

It has taken me 14 months to get here and it’s a biggy for me. And I know it sounds ridiculous, but FINALLY cutting the grass is fun again.

I’ve written so many times about the power of positive thinking, choosing my thoughts the same way I choose my clothes every day—choose wisely. I’m still learning.

And “if nothing ever changed there’d be no butterflies.” Yes, hindsight is 20/20 and all that blah.

So this is where I release Mr. Yesterday from this column space. Eyes ahead companions. Life is now.

As I said earlier this story doesn’t end in chocolate, but it does end in something I’ve learned through you, Jon.

“Some day someone will walk into your life and make you realize why it never worked out with anyone else.”