Midnight found me all alone on the front porch yesterday, smoking a cigarette and reading in my red Winter coat and pajama pants. I don't know why--but for whatever reason--my head was full of thoughts of the far-away future. And yet, in retrospect I see that it was really fear of thinking of the past that was the catalyst for these thoughts.
The stars and moon were out last night; even a few fireflies had come to bob about in the garden darkness to keep me company in my loneliness. I can still hear the porch boards squeak faintly with each soft movement that I made; they were old and had know worry like mine before; they sympathized.
The passage that I had just read in my novel resonated sharply in my brain.
"You got something eating at you! Something gnawing at your guts! Something so bitter is simmers in your eyes and grits your teeth together! I know your kind. You ruin everyone who touches your life and God help the next person who loves you enough to be ruined!"
Many, many thoughts coursed through my head as the result of this passage.
The thoughts continued until my cigarette needed to be put out. It was then that I regained my focus upon reality.
Reality, however, only lead to a new and entertaining thought-stream: why was the difficulty of my life to determine how I--a cock-eyed optimist who was impatient for success-- to best handle, in any given moment, a profusion of random and often conflicting thoughts? Where was the harmony and delicate balance that I was constantly looking for in life?
Then I started to get angry. Would it always be like this? Would my thoughts never be synthesised into a rounded whole for me? Would perpetual inconsistency and indecision be the result of my constant need of mental simulation and entertainment? Damn my habit of wavering from one idea to the next!
It was then that I realized that finding harmony in a world full of ebb and flow, tensions and strains, was never to be an easy task for me. While sitting on my porch last night, pondering why I couldn't live a life full of relaxed and easy decisions, why day-to-day living conflicts and discomforts me, and why my logic intrinsically fails to guide me, I realized something important about myself. It was then that I realized that I didn't want harmony. It was then that, by some divine revelation, I came to understand that the only true state of non-conflict is inertia. And I knew I didn't want that.
I then smiled to myself and reveled in all the chaos that my life had produced up until this point.
Unexpectedly, my thoughts were interrupted by a late night dog-walker pacing his way down the street.
It was then that some enigmatic, invisible cloak dropped down to warp me from my beguiled state back into the cool, aloof, sanguine poise that is my norm. And then, before ascending the stairs and going to bed, I laughed aloud at all the chaos that was to come in my life. And I knew all would be as it was suppose to be.
