At my best, I spend a lot of time staring into space.

I am a daydreamer. A thinker. There are some who think of me as a man of action because I do get things done, and when I work at it, I am very efficient. But if I do not have my staring into space time, something in me starts to come undone. If I do have that time, things somehow get done. It’s odd. I can’t explain it.

I had a therapist once who tried to. She was also a neuroscientist as well as a therapist and my fascination with neuroscience began with her. Having an understanding of what goes on in the brain as we live through our lives with all our joys and traumas is fascinating. And if it does not fix the quirks in our behaviors, it at least facilitates understanding. And in my world, understanding is the foundation of compassion.

She tried, but this particular quirk of mine is not cleanly explained by science yet. They have ideas, but nothing proven. One of those, we just have to accept it and go on.

I will tell you that I admire people who move from feeling to action quickly and with certainty. Who don’t have to take time for emotions and ideas to form and get put to work. I am sure there are downsides to that immediate feeling to thought connection, but I think of all the time in my life, particularly the past twenty years or so, that I have spent just thinking and feeling, and can’t help thinking somehow I have wasted a lot of time DOING nothing.

But maybe not. THe years before I came to the way I am, I did tend to move quickly from idea and emotion to action. I accomplished a lot. A lot of people were impressed with me. I wasn’t. It was just the way I worked.

But I came to understand, after my coming apart and rebuilding, that perhaps, moving so quickly, acting so quickly, while it made me good at some things, it also meant I missed a lot. I missed other people’s emotions some times. I missed details (I still am a lousy detail person). I even missed a lot about myself – moving so fast to do things that my own feelings never got caught up.

When I broke. When I came undone. When I lived in a black emotional hole for a few years, seemed like the worst of things at the time. But, as I started out of my dark, I did the work, years of it. Moved. Began a new life with no one’s expectations on me, I moved towards a life that worked differently. This life of letting myself learn to work the way my emotions worked. Slower. A lot slower. THink slow. Act fast is how I do things now. Not think fast act fast.

It’s not everyone’s way. But it is mine and it is truer to my nature. I just didn’t see it way back win. I got caught up in what I could do, not what was healthy for me to do. I suspect a lot of us are like that.

So, in the end, the tragedy was actually a journey to a better, if very different life. I’ve learned that disaster often leads to wonderful things. I am more vulnerable, and somehow stronger. Damned if I understand it. It just is.

Why am I writing this?

Well, first, someone wrote me yesterday saying that I hadn’t written any thoughts, any essays for quite a while. They missed them. I hadn’t thought about it, but they were right, So I decided to write a spot of prose again, to get back into the habit, and this is what came out. A lot of gratitude for the bad things in my life that led to good things, and there are a lot of them.

And secondly, If there is one thing that I have learned in writing this blog of poems and thoughts for the past 15 years, it is that there is always someone out there who is going through whatever I write about. It’s a big world and our emotions, even when we think they are unique, are not. If I can write about my disasters turning to gold (and they have), I might, just maybe, stumble onto a reader who needs to hear that hope. And for me, that is a wonderful thing, to reach and touch and make a positive difference to someone.

So, if you are there, in a dark place, hang on. There is light out there and it always returns and even the broken find that they are more, not less, for their journey.

Be well. Travel wisely,

Tom

PS – the photograph is of a broken cup, repaired in the Japanese Kintsugi style. Kintsugi (literally, gold seams) is a traditional repair method that takes the broken or chipped parts of cherished vessels, glues them back together with a Japanese lacquer, and paints the seams with gold or silver powder, illustrated that even the broken may become things of beauty and great value. Over the years, Kintsugi has been one of my personal touchstones.