The Memory Ghost

 

I've been reading some of the past entries... and realized I've spent far too much time apologizing at the opening for my tardiness and/or the length of time it's taken me to put together a new post here... so I'm not going to do it anymore... life has been life recently and I've really needed the extra time to reflect and plan... so thank you for your patience and thank you to the people who contacted me to make sure I'm OK... I am OK... but changed... hopefully for the better but time and the tides will be the judge of that.

I've had a bit of a block and I realized that writers are not people who are somehow magically gifted to turn out amazing stories and articles... we struggle with our thoughts and the ideas daily... someone once said "if what you are writing does not keep you awake at night thinking about it... it's going to put everyone else to sleep who will eventually be reading it."... I still have a lot of new things to experience and older experiences to write about, I just needed to sort out my thoughts... I've learned with my experiences here and other writing venues that it's about patience and persistence to not give up... just like with life we have to get on with the story and keep it going.

Do you know what a memory ghost is?... it' not a real ghost... but maybe a restaurant where you fell in love... or a song that takes you back to the summer of 1977 and the hot sun and cool nights..

and the movie you can't watch without crying because it makes you miss someone or something so badly...it's the book you reach for when you need a place to escape during difficult or troubling times or to just relive a moment that could be lost to time... a memory ghost is a memory that is so strong it's left an invisible scar on your soul... and can't and should never be forgotten.

Some of the memory ghosts I've been visited by when I wake up in the middle of the night have distracted me from what I was planning to write here or other errands I sometimes try to outline and organize at 3:30 in the morning... one morning this dawned on me...

With all the things that I've been dealing with over the last year... one of the things that keeps coming into my thoughts is that I look around my neighborhood or on news and social media outlets is that we are living with so much fear and dread... and too many people are getting comfortable with hate and finding unity being mean and miserable... it's a decision we all have to make of either joining in or not getting dragged into it and getting lost in it (maybe forever)... I am never going to stop being positive and doing the right thing...I will not become a toxic person in what is becoming a toxic world in the workplace, playground or on the streets where we live... I look at this when I need a little encouragement...

Maybe it's just me... but it seems like in the last five to six years... living and life have become really much more difficult... I am so grateful that I don't have to endure everything else the world is throwing our way alone or in poor health... I think about that when I'm having an off day... Something that occurred to me in the last month or two is that if you try to make things easier...you can actually make them worse... exercising every day can be hard or a challenge... but not moving and being stuck  is harder...uncomfortable conversations are hard but always avoiding conflict is harder... mastering anything is hard... but having no skills to speak of is harder... so easy comes with a high price tag... Another thought is that it seems like we are being bombarded with people saying that we are taking away their freedom... and I'm a big believer in freedom, but ironically most of these people are trying to take away other peoples freedom... I think we should all be free to choose... but we must also take the responsibility and the consequences of our choices... With that... Life will never be easy...it will always be hard...but only if we have to have the choices so can we choose our difficult choices wisely... and accept the consequences and work with them.... I miss consequences... because it seems like a lot of people are making the worst possible choices and not facing any consequences... but maybe they are just slow to be delivered.

So in the last couple of years four losses from death have deeply impacted  my life... in the last few years I've had to cut contact with several toxic people... those relationships deeply impacted my life negatively until I had the courage to move on and away from them and had the courage to admit that I was no longer going to accept the level of life they were offering me....Either way it's not easy... but you learn this... You realize how much you truly love and miss someone who has died or you learn... how much peace and happiness you have without the people you have moved on from.

For some of the things that are not meant to be memory ghosts...they won't go away until it teaches us what we need to know... and with that... you keep encountering the same people and situations until you learn the lessons you are supposed to learn!

I promised way back in another entry I would come back to song writing and maybe I will a little later...Meanwhile I found some notes and doodles on the sheets of some piano music I was working on a while ago... and I wrote a metaphor above one of the bars... The white keys represent happiness and the black keys denote sadness... well all these years later I realized you need both to create music... just like life..

Where are we going next?... I have some ideas... but before next time consider this... A mile of highway will take you exactly one mile... a mile of runway can take you almost anyplace in the world... Get out your passport... we are going on an adventure!

 

Oh and one more thing... while I have been considering and struggling with what to write or not write about here I've realized that some of the best moments of our lives... we can't or should not share  with anyone else... ever... See you next time.