As the post title says, I haven’t sat down to write and post an entry on this blog in a long time. I last published something here in 2022. Over the past four years, I tried to force myself to share a few times. I also made a frustrating, failed attempt to update the website’s look—a soft reboot, so to speak.
But life happened, events big and small. I also no longer felt I had anything to share here. Well, that is not entirely true. This website never drew a big following. When I started it, I did so for the simple, therapeutic pleasure of organizing my thoughts and feelings and finding meaning in sharing my experiences. My writing was, more than anything else, solely for me.
At some point, I started telling myself I had nothing to explore or share in words. The world around me felt chaotic, silly and heartbreaking. All I could do, I thought, was shrug my shoulders and keep going, one day at a time. Four years passed. And now, here I am, on a warm, sunny late-fall afternoon, typing in my sunroom on a computer I rarely use.
Why here? Why now? Part of it is because of long periods of quiet reflection over the past year. I’ve tried to slow down in my acting and thinking. I find joy in regular meditation. For the first time in a long time, perhaps ever, I spend more days calm than anxious. Events taking place outside myself affect me less than they used to. I can only do what I can actually do, which entails reacting to the world and people around me as kindly and with as much grace as I can muster. At the very least, I try not to create more pain in the world through how I react in my interactions.
I also turned 50 in 2026, which I am sure is part of things slowing down. Only by experiencing it do I find turning half a century old strangely weird, more an experience of settling than unsettling. I’m of an age where I don’t feel old, or what I assumed “old” must feel like. I simply feel like me, like I believe I’ve always felt. But that cannot be entirely true.
I look at my parents. My dad soon turns 80. My mother is 72. They are in good health. They bicker and fight. They are my parents, a constant relationship my whole life. But today, when I spend time with them, I realize we have few years left together. They cannot do all the things they did even a few years ago. There is a sweetness and a melancholy in not only knowing but experiencing how finite time really is. I was a fool to waste so much time with what now feels like petty distractions.
Then I remember to practice kindness and give myself grace, too. I’ve had so many weird, wonderful, heartbreaking, joyous, and disappointing adventures in my life. Each one led me to where I am today, calmly sitting in my sunroom in a home with a partner I love dearly. Then I forgive myself again, remembering I’ve simply been living my life as best I could in each moment, before returning my thoughts to the present.