It's unfortunate that I didn't get to document all of my thoughts last night upon arriving home. Obviously it is best to capture the moment while it is fresh in one's head, but when you have a talkative mother awaiting you at the end of your trip, it stands to reason you will not be able to do anything at all for a good hour or so. As if that isn't enough to make the thoughts a little less clear, weariness had set in, and I doubted my ability to form coherent sentences, let alone properly convey all I had contemplated the previous two and a half hours. I have no doubt that I won't be able to express how I felt as well as I could have had I instantly been able to begin writing, but I figured it would be worth a shot.
I can safely say that my life has had its share of change lately; conventional wisdom is to not make too many major life changes in a short period of time, and I think I pretty consistently violate that principle. Chalk it up to an inability to sit still, and perhaps some misfortune. Car rides used to drive me crazy; I hated that I had uninterrupted time with nothing to do but think, as thinking was always the gateway to depression. My normal practice always used to be to play my music loudly. If I could hear myself think, then that meant the music was not loud enough. That works for shorter car rides, but it didn't quite work so well on the long ones. By and large, much of the last four years of my life have had quite a few long car rides alone. Many people love car rides, but many people don't go on them solo with the same frequency I did; local music was something I often had to travel a couple of hours to see, and of course the pool of interested parties in these shows was limited. Lately, though, my long car rides haven't been quite as melancholy, and sometimes not even at all depressing. Last night, though, was different, in that it was actually enlightening to me in a positive way.
A struggle of mine has always been turning my brain off; I have had this issue for more than a decade now, but it wasn't always negative. In my younger years, it was often pondering of a philosophical nature and wasn't quite as personal. I am an emotional person, but my ability to put thinking first has dominated my stream of consciousness. My greatest issues arise when thinking and emotion don't yield the same conclusion; my thought process defaults to reason, but emotions can be quite strong and unyielding. Over the years it has gotten worse, as when you make a living sitting at a desk analyzing problems all day, it's not quite so easy to turn that off afterwards. I ended up in counseling with a lovely woman, though, who focused on teaching me how to feel. She would ask me how things made me feel, and my response always began with "I think". It was so ingrained in me that it was second nature, but once this tendency of mine was revealed to me, it enabled me to actually work on not defaulting to this tendency. Certainly these habits are not easily broken, but I have made significant progress, and I saw that progress really culminate into a pretty profound time for me, one that I hope to carry over with me. It all boiled down to this for me, life, and the ability to feel, is the most absolutely incredible and awe inspiring thing imaginable.
Much of my recent history has been spent either lamenting better days that are never to return or dreaming of a future I didn't feel optimistic about. The car ride home was one filled with memories, memories that triggered more memories, and then the floodgates opened. But something different happened this time: instead of focusing on the thought, I focused on the feeling. I didn't think about how great that time was, how I wished that things could be a certain way again, but I let myself feel the sensations I felt at that point in time. I could smile. I could focus on my mood rising as I related with those sensations. And it made me think about how amazing, truly amazing, the ability to feel is. Now more than ever, people are quick to feel like the other folks in their lives are there for the journey with them, but my analogy is that the vast majority of our friends in life are merely hitchhikers. They may join you in your car for a period of time, but ultimately they have a destination that is different than your own. You have to simply enjoy the company for the short period of time you share the car with them, but not get attached and wish that the hitchhiker was going with you to your destination. That's the pitfall, both with people and with memories. The trick is to just appreciate that time for what it was but to focus on the feeling it generates. By focusing on the emotion, you retain the positive component of the experience while partially detaching it from the person or object it is associated with. It's not forgetting the stimulus, but it is honing the ability to separate the emotion from the stimulus.
That's what the car ride turned into for me, reflecting on experiences, but instead of focusing on how much I missed them, I was able to focus on the sensations they created. It left me more optimistic; I went down this entire timeline of events, and I got to re-experience such a wide range of sensations at various ages of life. My previous tendency to miss a time period or to think that a certain age represented the best years of my life went out the window. No longer was I chained down with the notion that happiness was tied to certain people or times exclusively. Ultimately, it made me truly witness the beauty of life. There's such a profound ability for humans (most of them) to feel, and to think about the breadth of experiences one can live through in a lifetime is astonishing. It gave me the sense as if life all just flowed so perfectly, that I was floating and could be free. I felt as though I wanted to just close my eyes and let my car carry me (don't worry, I didn't completely lose my ability to reason and left my eyes open while traveling 70 mph). Perhaps most crucially for me, it liberated me to believe that the future held something worthwhile, not because the future is necessarily so bright, but because whatever happens, the ability to feel will persist.
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