Reading harold_maude's journal

Here it is almost the end of Febuary and change is in the wind.
Change is good. Things get shifted, moved out of the way, and the road becomes all that is ahead of you.

Tomorrow we find out if we have a new place to live or not.
This next week one of the guys here who has been here a little longer than us is leaving this city.
I'm both happy and sad at his departure. Happy for him because he's been dancing around this decision for well over a year now.
And to finally see him make the decision to go forward is good.
All of the months of frustration at knowing he needed to move forward are done.

I told him if he comes back after a month with his tail between his legs I was going to kick him in the butt.
And I will. To watch someone struggle for so long working through every possiblity again and again and then to see them back down once they start going forward is enough to drive you crazy.

That aside, this change that is before is tenative right now.
And if it goes through and we have a new place to live, then all of this that has gone on here can be finally put to rest.
I want it to be. I don't want to face any thing that will remind me of the things that have gone on here, and the subsequent end result.

I need spring to happen in my life. There needs and will be time to really recharge.
So when the next step comes in the journey I will be ready to just go.

When I leave somewhere I don't ever take a trip down memory lane.
I hardly do that now with the places I've been or the things I've done in the past. Sometimes it's hard for me to remember things of childhood.
They seem so far removed from where I am now.
And ten years down the road this place will seem very far away.

I am learning very quickly that to spend life looking back and dreaming and wanting what was back there is somthing that costs you being able to see what is right in front of you or even ahead down the road.

I can't take back anything of the past. I can't hold the things I used to love or talk to the people who are dead and burried again.
I used to spend hours lost in thoughts of adventure, and arguments with people who pissed me off.
Telling them off again and again. But that is something that has disapeared from my life it would seem, that need to self justify my particular perspective no matter how tangled it was or even how accurate it was and ended up being.

I have for many years now seen things down the road, seen inside of people where the truth is about who they really are, completely stripped of any and all masks that people so often wear to protect themselves.
I have know lots of things, and I have learned that what most people want isn't the truth about what they need to change inside them, they want to know about tomorrow. They want to have someone validate their disorted self dillusion that they are wonderful and in control.

I've wanted that. We all do at some point and often at lots of points in life we want that.
We want to have the assurance that we are strong, and masters of our world, and that we are the very best we can be.
And that we are loved, and thoes we believe love us really do.

The idea that our problems and phobias and fears are more in control than we want to admit is aborrant to us because it means that we are just as capable of really bad shit as the asshole that we want to beat the crap out of when what they are doing is really, really unnessiary and stupid.

The biggest problem is that the truth really often does hurt.
I don't know if it would hurt so much if we were brought up from childhood with the notion that to be the best of who we are capable of being means that life is often filled with things that will challange our very nature and when we overcome and come out stronger in the end is just the way things are.

But we want the fairytale world we have been surrounded with day after day through advertising and through everything else that is an illusion that surrounds us.
Gives us a false sense of belief that we are invincible and that if we have so much of this or that we have arrived at the pinicle of everything....

But life doesn't do things that way. Somedays life is good, somedays it really sucks from the moment you wake up.
And thoes days are the berometer days of what's inside you, in need of attention.

I've learned that because of all of this, people really don't listen. They are too busy thinking about what they are going to say next.
Our lack of real communication makes us strangers even to ourselves, hopelessly drowing in the desperate need to have someone really understand us and the hope that when they do get it they won't run away in horror at what they see.

We fill the hours of uncomfortable discomfort with things that will soften thoes places and at least make them not so loud.
We busy ourselves to fight bordom. To get through the hours when we are alone.
Sometimes even in a crowed room we are alone. We are distant from the people we should be closer too, and sometimes too close to thoes that are nothing more, in reality than just filling space in our world.
So we don't have to spend time looking in the mirror and not having a clue as to who we are, and how the hell did my face and body age so fast kind of thing.

So I have come to the place where I don't say a whole lot anymore about what I see. If someone asks me I will tell them don't ask if you are looking for anything other than my view, and my observations, which may not be pleasant or even seem kind.

..and please don't be pissed if I tell you that big elephant you've got in the front room has just taken a really big shit and it stinks...
your the one who brought it in the house in the first place and then expected the rest of us to live with it...or something like that.

In all of this, through all of this, I have found that I have a hard edge to me now. Self protection more than anything.
I've wondered if compassion still exists at all in me now.
Or if I've become this hard bitch that looks at tough things that life throws at people and says "this is your opportunity to find out what's inside you. Don't whine about it. In the end it has the power to change you into someone you never thought you could be. A more decient human being, and someone who is no longer sleeping through life."

...it will be interesting to see what the next year unfolds, and how many scars remain after this place is behind me.
And just everything else along the way.

I don't expect everything to all of a sudden become smooth or perfect, what ever that is.
But I'm up for change, and everything that comes with it.
I'm game, even if everything just blows up every 5 minuets.
Even if at the end of the road I'm sitting out in the middle of nowhere trying to decide what direction to head off in to.
After all I can always change the direction simply by turning my footsteps some other way....

It only looks that way because your standing on your head.