The ‘R’ Word, Part 2

Ending something of long standing is not only difficult, it can be odd. I suppose divorce can be like that. Maybe selling a house. The best metaphors I can come up with are pretty banal. It’s a bit like driving into a fog. You can’t see clearly where you are going, but you are very conscious of where you have been. Or, a hiking metaphor; you climb to the top of a ridge to see what is on the other side, and in that instant before you get to the top, your focus is almost completely on where you have been. The other side is rich with possibilities, enticing, but uncertain. Perhaps a little scary. You find yourself focused on the trees and rocks and gullies that you have just crossed over.

For the past few days I have been trekking through that routine and comfortable landscape. I have been focusing on the places and things and people I have been familiar with for years. I find myself thinking, ‘Well, I won’t be here again.’ Or, ‘Well, I won’t be doing this again.’ Or, ‘Well, I won’t be seeing him again.’

People usually operate in the present, thinking of what they are doing, or will soon be doing, or just did. Mostly present, with a smidge of past and future. And that is where, for me, things are odd right now. I am still functioning in the present, largely on autopilot, because great heaping gobs of past stuff is swirling into my present. ‘Future’ seems totally out of the picture for the moment, which leaves me a bit off balance. Odd.

It’s not exactly nostalgia, although there is certainly an element of that sprinkled in. There is probably a technical term for this, something from the field of psychology. Something Teutonic, I’m sure, like ‘weltschmertz’ or ‘schadenfreud’. But I think nostalgia, inaccurate as it may be, will just have to do.

It isn’t a bad feeling, in fact it is somewhat comforting.

There is no lesson here. No wisdom I can pass on. No way to make this clearer or more sensible to anyone else. It’s just part of the subtle changes that we all go through in the trip from wherever we are from to where ever we will be.