I am listening to the final speech from A River Runs Through It thinking about how fast time moves. Occasionally I glance at the video and smile because I am not old, but not so young that I can’t appreciate the montage of time it shows.
It has taken a year for me to really accept how much that moment last October scared me. I didn’t have time to be scared during the event, I was too busy fighting to stay alive.
Some ask me why I jump into the flames and burn and I say I do it with everything that matters to me. I love hard and live hard.
I believe in finding what scares you and shaking it until it doesn’t. So I keep diving back into the memory of that night trying to pull apart what I chose to forget and I have found more pieces.
Pieces I haven’t discussed, some of it because I would only share with a few and most don’t want to hear it. And because I can’t always just go there.
It changed me.
Some of it was already in place, the things that showed up in The Hero’s Journey- The 56th Year and elsewhere.
Some of that was an evolution of what began in The Hero’s Journey. I laugh when I look at that now, pictures of two different old pairs of shorts and a video of a much younger Josh.
Maybe the ghost that spends time after midnight reading will like those or enjoy a fragment of fiction I wrote about why they head here.
You’re concerned that your lips remember mine and that they like mine better than the lizard lipped guy yours brush against now.
You don’t like wondering why I cross your mind even when you make an effort to list every negative thing you can come up with. Let’s be honest, you do love your lists and trying to cross things off.
He is a distraction, a placeholder used to keep your body warm but he doesn’t fill the other gaps. You are not sure why, you wonder question and ask but it doesn’t fill the space.
So you go looking elsewhere and ask if someone else ever asks questions and thinks about the what ifs, the maybes and the what happened.
Are the insults they throw at the skeleton based upon jealousy, anger or something else. They could get much nastier and maybe inside the internal monologue they have and they do.
Or maybe they have gone through the old photos and emails and remembered all of the very good stuff and in spite of trying to disbelieve the magic they end up thinking maybe there is truth.
The multidecade long connections where you don’t remember where you didn’t know them even though you know that existed play a part.
The kids aren’t so young anymore and neither are you.
Shit happens, life happens and it reminds you there is a hard stop and you will never get a chance to have some conversations or experiences after it.
It is all a possibility and yet so is the one that says some people who used to care don’t feel a damn thing at all. They get bored and go surfing online in lots of different places. There is no meaning to any of it and they don’t care what message it sends or doesn’t send.
That is a problem for someone else, it is not their concern. They live their life with no regard for others because when they are done with them they are done.
It is that simple.
The Substack is beginning to grow and I am torn about where to spend my time. The writing is a bit different there than it is here and I am trying to decide how I want to proceed there.
If I make some adjustments I can grow it. What I have learned is that I like having readers more than I realized.
It pushes me just a bit to be more consistent and that is a good thing.
That sort of consistency is being applied elsewhere and it is why I feel so much stronger than I have in years. I let myself get sucked into other things and that led to some bumps and bruises I didn’t need.
But OTOH it also gave me the strength to make sure that when I was bleeding out I had the strength to get up from the floor.
Every day I take a moment to visualize the body I am building and to picture the future that goes alongside it. Every day I work on the road map to get there and measure progress.
And in between there are the moments where I try to pull that scary thing up and stare at it in the eye.
Nothing gets better or changes without action and I make things happen and if I forget that truth or get lost I roll through my list of accomplishments.
It grows longer each day by and I get that much closer.
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