When the Wolf Comes Home

Every once in awhile there are moments in time that you know are significant in some way, a whisper of an idea, seeing or hearing something profound. Or a feeling that maybe you're supposed to remind yourself of something very special...that you are missing something you don't remember.

One such occasion happened to me just about 5 years ago now. A night that was supposed to be about celebration that had turned to a realization, to resignation...and has brought me to where I am right now. I'll say this...life is never uninteresting.

On a night that my ex and I were celebrating our 19th wedding anniversary with a night away, a movie and a dinner out we ended up on opposite sides of the table staring at each other over souvlaki as if we were complete strangers. And I guess, in essence, we were. Later on that brisk evening, walking out of the theatre after seeing the movie Cloud Atlas, I found myself feeling like I had seen or heard something profound. Maybe it was a line in the movie, maybe it was the movie itself, I wasn't sure. And in that moment, as we walked back to the hotel, I was trying to articulate my thoughts when I was jolted back to reality..."I didn't like the movie." What? What did you say? How could I feel a seismic shift in thinking and she nothing at all?

Now, I'm not saying that her dismissal of my thoughts on the movie were the reason for us separating, I felt it was inevitable before that fateful night, but it is true that we separated two weeks later. A moment, frozen in time, when I realized that I could not, would not, live like that any more. I'm not casting blame on her here either, this was a failure on both our parts to be what we each needed to be for the other. We grew apart, we didn't talk to each other, only at each other and we stopped dating each other...our mojo gone. Lost in the years of doing what we were doing. No relationship can last in that sort of vacuum...the wolf had come home.

"There's bound to be a ghost at the back of your closet

No matter where you live

There'll always be a few things, maybe several things

That you're going to find really difficult to forgive

There's going to come a day when you feel better

You'll rise up free and easy on that day

And float from branch to branch, lighter than the air

Just when that day is coming, who can say, who can say?

Our mother has been absent

Ever since we founded Rome

But there's going to be a party

When the wolf comes home"

We all carry baggage around with us. The things we have done, things done to us, feelings hurt and spirits lifted, we are, as I have said a few times now, the culmination of everything that has happened to us up until this very moment. To my way of thinking, that wolf is us not making peace with our past and how that failure has helped to shape us. Which reminds me of the adage "you can't know where you're going without knowing where you've been."

These lyrics come from the song Up The Wolves by The Mountain Goats, which I heard on the show The Walking Dead...how's that for profound imagery, we the walking dead waiting for our wolves to come home, with either the sweet pain of death releasing us or finally realizing that all we have is what we have and our happiness comes from within first. 

I wonder what my next profound moment will be. Where will I be? Who will I be with? What is going on in the world? Not knowing is painful but exciting all the same.

And five years on, what was it that turned my world ever so slightly? This quote is as good as I can offer....

"Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the Theory of Relativity and Principles of Uncertainty: phenomenon that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday I believed that I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, that can shape and alter who we imagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment. At each point of intersection, each encounter suggests a new potential direction."

...and maybe that is good enough for today.

Ciao
D