Note to Myself: Happiness

Sometimes I feel that I live in a country where 30 means already “old”. Until you are this age, you have to have your own house, your own family, your child or at least planning one. I don’t have any of these. Not even that “steady” career that I have been working for so many years to achieve, and I have given so much to it, doesn’t seem so steady these days.

“What have I done in 30 years? What have I achieved?” – questions that are impossible not to ask yourself. “Am I too old already for the things mentioned above? Is there something wrong with me?” – again, haunting questions that you cannot avoid if you are a human being living in a society full of stereotypes.

I believe happiness, and some achievements, can be measured in small things, in the fingerprints that you leave somewhere on earth and on a soul – either they are remembered or not. I feel that those moments are in small hands rubbing your forehead when you don’t feel well, in friends who are stubborn to let you go and promise they will stay, no matter how bitchy you can be with them, in long walks, orange benches, books that change your perspectives, trips, long or short, in places you find your peace, students who tell you “thank you”, or achieve their dreams with your help, in all the people, all the friends, to whom you showed kindness and helped their dreams come true, in people with whom you shared some smiles, and build new memories, even if you let them go, too afraid of distances of different kinds. Memory, with its maze, is definitely my identity.

Call me Ray. Not because in my soul there is always sun and no storms, not because I am an optimist, not because sometimes I do not have power to believe in something/someone, but because I choose to remember the nicest memories, to see the goodness in people, to forgive more than maybe I should have. There is not a big thing that defines us, that we did/accomplished until this age, but the small, the tiny ones, that shape our wholeness so far.

Wilderness and warmth

I need my wilderness like the air that I breathe. To exist, to be, to live. I need it deep, into my bones,into my soul, in a world that I barely understand. In a world without meaning, in a world full of grey people, in a world where only superficial feelings, relations, involvements occur, in a world where I keep on giving all my warmth and keep on searching for a damn fucking gesture of warmth, of caring, 'cause I'm fucking blind when it comes to it. I need wilderness to see, and wilderness to feel, and wilderness to burn and use all my energy that is eating me inside, and stubbornness, to still believe in something, in that “goodness” of people, in people who are different, in a world, in a future worth living for. 
 Let me be. And let me live.

Personal Space and Memories, Fatherhood and Children

 “[…] did not know my father at a time when he was becoming; he seemed always to be the unchanging same, the force I had to deal with until long after he died one summer evening in my twenty-sixth year, massively and unforgivably died, while I was becoming the fluid, negotiating self I was to be for the next thirty years. He died without absolving me of taking up space in his life and, more, without teaching me that only I could absolve myself of that. I have done so, and now in my turn am trying, in middle-aged retrograde, to absolve him of the space he continues to take up in mine, space I could put to better use.

I have now outlived him by two years, yet I see him more and more often in the mirrors I look into, in the squat genetic shaping of my body to his. Getting to and passing the age at which he died was more of a hurdle than I thought it would be; I faced that moment, and the ones subsequent, with increasing fears that I am more mortally than empathetically his son. I can claim only an amateur psychologist's understanding of him, and that mostly by analogy with my own middle-aging and my own experiences as husband and father. I have no idea what he felt or thought, whether he thought at all, whether he thought he had time for or needed reflection.

He probably didn't know precisely what he wanted, but he knew he was more likely to find it in town than in the country, somewhere other than home. He mostly wanted to escape the farm that he hated, to escape whatever of hardship or ignominy he connected with poverty and rural life. More than anything he wanted respect and respectability, two different but not incompatible things.”

 (Noel Polk, Outside the Southern Myth)