The sun sets on another day…
It was a beautiful sunset, and the sky played games across the horizon. As I giggled and laughed, I dreamed about better days, worse days, and a little bit of melancholy snuck in for a second. It was only there for a fraction of a fraction of an instant, but I felt it, nonetheless. As the sky waned, I smiled and found my way back to this ridiculous sense of positivity that I hold on to dearly.
A friend of mine is in the hospital. I have not seen them in years but I keep up and try to keep things positive. As we reach a certain age this happens more and more and I feel sad that all the things that I’ve missed even though I’m living my life. As I took pause for a fraction of a fraction of a second I thought about times that could have meant more. Missed opportunities, missed moments and simply things that were missed. To be a friend it takes two and in this strange life that I have led it has always been hard to keep up with my life changing constantly.
Before I was 18 it was hard to have friends. The last city I was in as I turned 18 was the longest I had ever stayed anywhere and the rules have changed significantly and people were very different. I was an unwilling outcast who tried to be integrated but didn’t exactly fit the rules of the game that were lying before me. Prior to that I had very little time at any location to really build the bond of friendship and as I have reached out to some their memories of me have faded or gone.
Of course, there are some that have disappeared and are harder to find. But most of them I am patient and keep looking. The person in the hospital right now has kept in touch and gone through much in their life. Now they are going through something again and it is a difficult time at best.
As I think about it I think of the visions of that person and all of the things they mean to me. We are visions of what others interpret us as and I know that for some I am a positive vision while for others I was not. This is not all about me, but I know that as we interpret who we are with people there comes a time that we draw our self worth and their perceived worth and create a vision of a vision. A bubble of time that was shared becomes a positive or negative in our masterfully designed minds and quite often we don’t take the time to look at the potential other side of the coin, what that person thought of us. Quite often we see our own perceptions as valid but if we remove ourselves from the equation and start looking at more perhaps we will find that the vision we had of ourselves and the vision that we had of them was not the same. Perhaps we will realize that sometimes the stances we took or the decisions we made had a negative impact on someone else but we were too blind to see it or they were too positive to let us see it.
Of course the opposite is true. In my perfect world the opposite would be true more often. Those people that we tried to help or do something for and whose vision of us was far beyond what we felt we did. Those people saw us as everything from saviors to positive influences in their life even though to us we were just being who we are.
My question on this very introspective day is who are you? Are you the person who goes out of your way to help people and the only looks for the positives in the experience? Are you the person who sees others as detriments or problems to your self vision? Are you a person who feels so deeply that you love with all of your heart even if you are hurt with all of someone else’s? Are you the person who ignores your heart and lets others love you without regard to how you are treating them? Are you who you think you are?
For me, I am changing consistently. I have very good friends, friends that I can count on, people that I love, people that love me, and of course I am on a list of a lot of people who don’t. I will continue to grow and cultivate everything that I can. Somewhere in the middle I hope to find peace and perhaps a little comfort.
So as the sun sets on another day, be good. Be good and be good at it. Be good and be good at it and be better each day. Don’t hide your love, but instead find a way to share more deeply. Along the way, make yourself and a few other people happy, no matter what.
Sleep sweet, love life, and find your vision