Mayday

I'm not sure where I'm going with this one. I just know that I've had a lot on my mind for a long time, and I can't seem to let it go.

I suppose that's one of the real secrets to life, letting go; not being able to distract yourself, but having nothing to distract yourself from. Being mentally free. I wonder if anyone really feels that way, at least in the long term. I've experienced it in short bursts, but it's always interrupted eventually with some issue or another.

I can't believe it's been three years... three years since I started that walk to Walmart, three years since it was interrupted by a call asking if we wanted to play tennis, three years since we were dropped off after the tennis outing at the very same spot along our walk where we were picked up. Three years since we finished that walk to Walmart and when we were most of the way back, I finally mustered enough courage to do what I had set out to do several hours earlier.

Three years since I got the answer that I both dreaded and expected.

Of course, I wouldn't have put myself out there if I didn't think I had a pretty good chance. I thought my odds of success were pretty high, actually, maybe even higher than 90%. I never take risks like that unless I feel like I have a really good shot at succeeding. But at the same time, I almost always expect to fail when it comes to that kind of thing, mostly because if you set your expectations low, it's much harder to be disappointed. And that's where expectation and hope differ. Hope is the mitigating factor that encourages you to take stupid risks even when you think you won't succeed.

May 1st, 2011. It was the night that it was announced we had finally gotten Osama Bin Laden. I remember the distinct sense of irony I felt that such a great victory for our country would occur the day I suffered such a crushing defeat. But even then, as I contemplated how the next few months would play out, I hadn't resigned myself to total failure. The early stages of a long-term plan had begun to form in my mind, though I didn't realize at the time how short that "long-term" would be.

If you told me that day what I'd be putting on the line by making that initial move, what I'd be setting in motion and everything that would happen as a result... if I knew then what I know now about how things would turn out... I'd do it all over again. I'd think that maybe I could do things differently, maybe I could get things to turn out right, or at least better than they ended up. So I suppose that's the answer to the question of whether or not I believe in destiny. You can't very well hope to change the future and still believe in destiny.

There's no grand lesson here. There's no moral to the story, I have no bit of wisdom to offer. I used to post here hoping that what I wrote could do some good for whoever might read it. But I know, whether due to the infrequence of my posts or their increasingly more self-serving content, nobody really reads this anymore, which is really more comforting than anything. I understand that someone someday will probably come across this, and to you, whoever's reading, I apologize. I'm professionally upbeat, I do my best to maintain that air most of the time and I hate to betray it.  I just can't keep all this in anymore. It's gotta go somewhere.

It's funny though, because the answer I got that night three years ago was simultaneously exactly what I expected and even worse than I could have imagined... and yet it still turned around completely five days later. Maybe that's the lesson. Maybe I just need to wait it out, to be just proactive enough to get things started, and then bide my time and play it safe until things turn out the way I want. Or maybe I'm just reading into it, like I tend to do. There probably isn't any cosmic correlation.

5/1/14

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I can't help but feel like so many things this year have mirrored the events of years past. The other night, for instance, as we approached the RPI student union for the first time in a long time, I mused that on that very night three years ago (May 3rd, 2011), I had walked to the union with a friend to get food. The circumstances were a bit different, because on that night it was raining, and on this particular night it was quite nice out, but still. Constants and variables. In either scenario, walking to the union was an uncommon occurrence.

Just like I did the other night, I spent that night in the union three years ago in a kind of melancholy daze. My failure from a few nights prior was still fresh in my mind and was compounded by the fact that the object of my affection was out with the guy for whom she shot me down. So I made the best of the company and conversation at hand in an effort to take my mind off of it. Anything's better than brooding, right? As we walked back from the union that night, it had gone from raining to pouring. I spent the majority of the remainder of that night sitting on the railing on the porch outside the house, facing the road and listening to music while the rain came down overhead.

This past Saturday night, a beautiful May evening exactly three years later, we once again left the union... and once again, it was raining.

Again, there's probably no cosmic significance to any of this. It's probably just a coincidence that on the very same day at the same times and in the same circumstances three years apart, I happened to be doing roughly the same thing. But for me, the rain is the kicker. If it hadn't been raining as we left the union this time, I would have thought nothing of it. Of course, we couldn't finish a trip to Troy without at least passing by the house I lived in back then, and this time we actually got out and stood outside it for a decent chunk of time. I even walked up and sat on that railing for the first time in three years, and I pondered, as I have been for the last few days, the difference between expectation and hope. Of the former, I have none. Of the latter... I suppose I have an abundance.

And now here I am. Three years ago (May 5th, 2011), it was a Thursday night, and I was doing my best to get to sleep on a reclining armchair, because I had offered the aforementioned object of my affection the couch. Things happened so rapidly and so strangely over those three days that I could barely take it all in. My disposition turned from hopelessness to total confidence over the span of 48 hours. At that point, I certainly couldn't have predicted what would happen over the next three years. But here I am.

I can only wonder where I'll be three years from now.