🔵 By Timothy Brunner. Photo by lauragrafie.
How many lessons have I learned only to be slapped in the face with a relapse of thought that brings a forgotten lesson to mind? This is a lesson I have never forgotten, yet I must have abandoned it because that bold of lightning hit and struck me dumb. Or, struck me with the inspiration of how dumb I am. “Until death itself comes, no calamity need be feared.” This is a teaching I have tattooed on my arm, so it is not a lesson I am likely to forget. Yet I have abandoned it.
I was punched in the gut by remembrance while watching a TV show. In this show, a man mentions that the solution to his problem came in the realization that sometimes the worst thing you can think of happening actually does… and it isn’t had bad. You survive.
Death is the end all be all, so what else is truly relevant? Until death occurs all else can be valued in that all else is life. Another tattoo I have on the same arm reflects a dichotomy: Life and death – movement and stillness – war and peace. War and peace.
Life is movement and conflict while stillness and peace bring to mind death. So many religions teach a version of “death to self” in order to achieve inner peace. If, then, life is war, then I should embrace the struggles that let me know I am alive. Whether I fight alone or amid the masses, I am alive!
This is all I can ever really have: life. I can never truly possess anything more, but I can lose everything if I lose my life. Until I lose that, there is no such thing as defeat. I live, so I have not lost all that I ever actually had. Only in death does the battle end. In peace one can determine whether victory was achieved. Until then I still struggle. I still live.
I know that I am a hardened man. I am so distanced from the relationships that sustain me that I often fail in placing the emphasis where it needs to be in those relationships. I can appear selfish in my focus, but that is not accurate. In the efforts I put into changing my character I am also improving the way I interact with those whom I care about. I see these positive effects in the increased communications I have with family and friends. People who rejected my bullshit before are now open to reestablishing a connection. That is a significant change in my life that started with a change in me.
I know, too, that most people do not share as much of themselves with others as I do of myself. I set very few boundaries between myself and someone I decide to trust… to trust with my love. No secrets means something to me. I also realize that this leaves me susceptible to exposing some extremely unsightly truths about myself to people who might not be able to cope with who they see me to be. I am not a perfect person. I have been a horrible person. Maybe I deserve the sentence I was given and society is right to simply discard me as having too much potential for harm to ever be any good. Perhaps I am irredeemable. I cannot be the judge in this matter. Impartiality I would definitely lack.
In this arena, it is you who is afforded that opportunity. I cede that to the audience and throw myself on the mercy of the court! If you decide that the harm I’ve caused or may cause is greater than any potential good I have caused or may cause, rest with the assurance that I will die in prison. Until that day comes, I still live. I understand and accept this judgment regardless of my feelings. My emotions are not, and will never again be, more important to me than anyone else’s. Any relationship, even in a most general community sense, involving distinct individuals, is going to have conflict. Some wrongs can never be moved past. I have done many, many things that can never be repaired. Before I allow my existence to harm another person, today, I will walk away.
I have done this often in my life. I leave as a way to control damage. I don’t necessarily mean protecting others from my bad acts, though that is a theme from my past. No; I mean protecting others from the toxic effect my past acts still bleed into the present. I didn’t speak to my mother for almost 6 years because the contact hurt more than it healed. Today, that is different, which proves to me that I was right to walk away in the first place.
Walking away has so often left me feeling alone, but those emotions are just feelings. I eventually move past them as my mother eventually moved past her pain regarding me.
As hard reality for a hardened man is actually sensible. As a change in perspective, I will take my separations as solitude instead of loneliness. Maybe that will be enough, but it is my responsibility either way.
All that remains is to live.
Until death itself comes.