Learning to live with it

For some reason, the welter of memories conjured by going back has led mostly, eventually, to gratitude. I'll take it, considering the alternatives. I was driving around a couple evenings ago and the fact settled over me that whatever risks and complications, tensions, nostalgia for what couldn't be, loss, frustrations, sorrow, confusion, or even outright bewilderment, all of it, 100% worth it. I think we need to find moments where this is the case, or something in us turns from blood to cinder. 

I am feeling worn down to the bone today. I taught a demo lesson for one school, via Zoom, and then was in four hours of Zoom interviews with another school, yesterday. I went out afterward to a place that held some sweet memories, had a huge dinner, watched the Minnesota sunset from a dozen different vantage points on the way back to the hotel. The school for which I taught the demo is recommending that I be hired, but it has to go through the university HR department, as the faculty of the school is adjunct at the university. My fingers are crossed that there won't be any hitches, but it means a complete transformation of my life over the next three weeks if so. 

I think most accurately the truth of the past many months has been that I am learning to live with all of it. I don't move on. It's not in my nature really. It makes it challenging to be getting older, since all of what I've been stays with me. But I am learning to accept it. I don't get over things, I don't move on. I learn to live with. Trying to force forgetting or getting over or moving on is futile. It's not in my nature. Letting go looks like accepting that I'm going to learn to live with whatever has happened. 

I've seen that going back and learning to live with are intimately connected. And no matter the anger, sorrow, confusion, chaos, bewilderment, since I'm going to be living with the reality, I'm charged with truth and reconciliation. It helps to use the tools I have for perspective. One day, sometimes one minute, at a time. 

Owning and taking responsibility for all of my own choices, decisions, all along the path. Letting blood stay blood. Washing the grit and cinders from the torn and slashed places. Praising whatever was possible enough to honor it with grief. Plasma is 90% salt water, so, basically the tears that platelets swim in. Learning to live with it.