An Apolgy, Redux

~ riggledo ~ Leave a comment

OK, so I deleted the old Typepad blog the other day and lo and behold, it seems a bunch of the graphics for my blog posts here were still tied back to that blog.  I’ve been updating what I can with the pictures that were missing, knowing I can’t update all of it.

But guess what!  WordPress is reposting these edited posts to readers AGAIN!  Unfortunately, I’m not finished updating the posts either, so just know that there are going to be some duplicated posts in your feeds.  I apologize for that.  I’d let it go, but then my skin would melt off my body and some mean psychopath (otherwise known as my perfectionism) would squeeze lemons all over me and laugh while I writhe in pain… Or, nothing would happen.  Not sure which.  Don’t want to take the chance.

Forgive me.

Earth Day, Shmearth Day

~ riggledo ~ 2 Comments

Today is Earth Day.  To be honest, I couldn’t care less, but it is.  I am, by no means, a rabid environmentalist.  I don’t care that much about recycling.  I do it because I’m “supposed to” and it has been made fairly easy to do.  Also, I drink enough Diet Pepsi, and pay enough California Redemption Value (basically a bottle deposit only on plastic and aluminum as well as glass, for those of you non-Californians) to make it worthwhile to collect it all up and take it to the recycling center once in a while.  Plus it keeps it out of the hands of the little old lady who wants to come by and dig in my recycle bins at 6:00 in the freaking morning on a Sunday! Do you have any idea how much noise all that aluminum and/or glass makes?

I’m not a conservationist.  I drive a hybrid, but I don’t do it because of the environment, though it does happen to be a “partial zero emissions” exhaust, whatever that means.  Seems to me like it’s either zero emissions or it’s some emissions, in which case it’s not zero.  Seems like an either is or is not kind of situation to me, but what do I know?  No, I drive my hybrid because I was paying close to $60.00 for a tank of gas that only lasted me 8-10 days in my SUV and now I pay about $25.00 for a tank of gas that lasts me nearly, if not more than, three weeks.  I drive nearly twice as far, on half as much.  To me that’s a no brainer.

Today is Earth Day and I could care less.  All the funny people on Twitter (and most of the not so funny ones) are talking about it.   Sarah and Vinnie talked about it on the radio this morning too, although actually, they talked less about it than they have in the past, for which I am exceedingly grateful.  The problem is they talked about it.   They are the first people to talk to me each day and they start talking to me before I’m really even awake.  From the moment they mentioned that today was Earth Day, I’ve had the Earth Day song stuck in my head, and I never even heard it this year.  Only I don’t know the correct lyrics, let alone the tune and so what keeps going through my head goes like this:

Earth Day

Earth Day

It’s Mother Earth’s Birthday

Earth Day

Earth Day

Let’s go have a beeeeeeer…

Since the song is sung by a chorus of children I’m pretty sure that’s not right, and I was actually quite surprised to find that when I searched for “The Earth Day Song” on Google, so I could find the correct lyrics and maybe even a link to the song for those of you sadistic enough to subject yourselves to it, there were dozens upon hundreds of different results, all of which were legitimate results and none of which were the song I was looking for.  You’ll just have to take my word that those are not the correct lyrics.

I celebrated Earth Day by printing about a ream worth of paper.  I decided that I wanted to have hard copies of all my writing, rather than depending on the blog sites (I’ve had a blog before this one) to retain my stuff.  I didn’t even finish.  Who knew I had written so much.  But I figure I made a nice enough dent in the rain forest for one day (plus my boss came back early from his “all day” meeting so I figured I should stop… for now.)

I came to work late today, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to do anything for the first hour anyway.  The furniture guys came back to replace the stand on my height adjustable desk.  A few weeks ago, I got a new desk that can be adjusted so I can stand up while I work.  I’ve actually found my self to be far more productive when I’m standing, but far more importantly – to me – my hamstrings will hopefully loosen up now that I’m not sitting down all day every day.  Also standing burns more calories than sitting in general.  The problem is the base that they delivered didn’t crank up high enough.  I was making due with it temporarily, but it needed to go up about five more inches than it did.  The sales guy says that they were shipped the wrong item from the manufacturer, but I can’t help but question that, since what they replaced it with is an electric base ($500 more expensive than what we requested.)  With the other base I had to turn a crank to adjust the height of the table, now I only have to push a button.  In actuality, this is better because when I do sit down (even though it’s a stool) the table is too high from when I was standing.  Now I can adjust the table height depending on whether I’m sitting or standing and it’s easy and quick.  But it is electric.  More electric, means more carbon emissions and all that good stuff.  Happy Birthday Mother Earth!

Speaking of carbon emissions and electricity, I’ve had my fan on all day because I’m hot.  I’m hot because my head is covered.  This past Sunday, while I was showering and preparing for my outing with Lil’B, after two and a half mishap-less years of cabeza shaving, I carved an inch long section of flesh right off the top of my head… literally.  Scalped myself.  I was able to extract the removed flesh from the blades of my razor and it looked rather like the end result of a bar tender extracting twists from the rind of a lemon; about a quarter inch wide and an inch long.  Fortunately, I shave in the shower because it bled and bled and bled.

I’ve been walking around for the last five days with a band aid on my scalp and I don’t feel like showing it off to the world – or fielding the questions – so instead I’ve been channeling my inner douche bag and rocking the backwards Kangol Hat, even indoors.  I figure I’ve got a couple more days before the wound is sufficiently healed enough not to need a band aid and then I’ll decide if the gash in my dome is too obvious to let people see or if I can leave the hats for outdoor attire.

Answers? Maybe.

~ riggledo ~ 5 Comments

Things I’ve learned in the last 48 hours:

  1. All but two of you people can not follow instructions (and one of those two kind of cheats.)
  2. More people feel similarly to how I feel than I realized.
  3. Those questions were deeper and more stirring than I imagined them to be.

I read my last two blog posts to my therapist yesterday.  Part of what prompted me writing them was thinking about how I feel about my life at this point and what may or may not be the point of continuing to go to therapy.  I felt like, at least in part, those posts answered some of the questions that I’ve been considering and that I imagine Deb might be considering, as well.

When I read her the questions her eyes got really big and she said, “Wow!  Those are some big questions.  Have you gotten any responses?”

“Yes,” I told her, “One person responded right before I left to come here.  Which is disappointing because at this point, I know the post has been read ten times.”

The truth is I thought, however naively, that those questions would be easy for people to answer.  I thought most of the people who read that post would be able to whip out a few sentences and explain the meaning of their lives to me.  I don’t honestly know if I thought everyone would have a wonderful, beautiful, meaningful story to tell that would confirm my suspicion that my life doesn’t mean anything, or if I thought everyone would have a story similar to mine that would help me find some sort of comfort in this meaningless, day to day grind.  Whatever I thought, I expected to have my comments section filled up with replies to my questions and my pleas for assistance.

The truth is Jody, my first respondent, nearly took the words out of my mouth.  Jody says:

“I get up because I have to. I get up because I am awake. I have nothing that makes me bound from my bed in happiness or joy or fear or desire. I get up because that is what we do.”

“You know these questions make me feel like I have nothing going for me.”

“Hell, I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like a waste of space. That I will be one of those people when gone no one misses.”

Terri’s answers leaned a little more in the other direction, relating that what gets her out of bed in the morning is a job she enjoys, with people she likes and feeling valued in her work.  I envy that for sure.

Terri cheated a little.  I specifically asked that you not answer with “my kids” and that’s what she did, but after reading her answer, I understand why:

“I don’t know yet. I really don’t know. The easy answer is my kids. My kids are the focus right now. Raise them. Help them be successful. Help them take flight and hopefully help them not to make the same mistakes I made. What scares the hell out of me is who I am and what is my purpose when they’re grown and on their own. I was barely old enough to start wondering about my purpose before they came along, so I had to put those thoughts off for the past 21 years. A couple more years and I’ll have to face that question for real.”

I’m surprised really that only two people responded to my little “interview” and even more surprised that I didn’t get even one uber-peppy, my-life-is-all-rainbows-and-butterflies-wonderful responses.

My answers, which I did not want to share in that post, are far more doom and gloom:

What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Fear.  I get out of bed because I’m afraid not to.  I’m afraid to lose my job and not have a pay check.  I’m afraid to lose my income and not be able to pay my rent and my car payment and my bills and have my life be turned upside down to suck even more than it already does because I’m homeless and broke.  I don’t get out of bed because I can’t wait to get to work.  I don’t get out of bed because there are such great things and wonderful people waiting for me outside my front door that I can hardly wait to get going.  I get out of bed – late – because if I don’t, things are going to go from bad to worse.  And that’s a really sucky reason.

What do you believe is your purpose in life?  What is your reason for living?

I haven’t got the slightest inkling what my purpose is.  There really isn’t even anything more to say about that.  I have no idea what may be my reason for living.

What do you live for?  What keeps you going?

My answer is the same.  It isn’t for any kind of fulfillment or personal satisfaction.  I don’t have any of that.  I don’t get any satisfaction, whatsoever, from my job.  Aside from the paycheck every other week, which never seems to go far enough, my job gives me nothing.  I don’t like the people I work with; I don’t like the customers I serve; I don’t even like the field I’m in and yet, I have no inkling of what I could do instead that would provide any of that satisfaction.

I don’t have children, nor do I want them.  I really thought, though, that being a Big Brother would be something that would give me some of that sense of accomplishment or fulfillment; I thought it would give me some satisfaction.  It doesn’t.  I like Lil’B a lot and for the most part we have fun when we hang out, but if something happened and I couldn’t be his Big Brother any more, I really wouldn’t be bothered by it.  In fact, it would be a bit of a relief.

So while it does seem to be somewhat of a cop-out answer, what keeps me going is the fact that I am alive.  I do wake up every morning, like it or not, and therefore, I have to keep going… like it or not.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this except to say that clearly I’m not the only person in my world who struggles with these questions.  I suppose that’s comforting in a way, although, knowing how very much it sucks, I do feel badly for the other people in the same boat.

While the questions were intended to be for my edification, I can’t help feeling badly for asking them now that I realize how tough they are.  I hope no one was harmed by reading those questions and being forced to consider them.  I don’t know why I didn’t realize how tough they would be.

I don’t really know where to go from here.  I am reaching for a conclusion, both for my state of mind, and for this post.  It seems, however, like the truth is there is no conclusion… yet.

Interview

~ riggledo ~ 8 Comments

The song says, “Gotta put it all behind you, ‘cause life goes on.”  My response was, “’Life goes on?’  What life?  I struggle a lot with this one and it’s actually prompted what will probably be tomorrow’s post if I can get it together in time,” and then I mulled it over for a while.  Obviously, it wasn’t “tomorrow’s” post, but it is next so close enough.  I decided to conduct a little interview with you, the reader.  There were a few questions I wanted to ask in an effort to gain a better understanding, to try and change my own perspective about this thought, “Life goes on.”

Five specific questions came to mind.  What gets you out of bed in the morning?  What do you believe is your purpose in life?  What is your reason for living?  What do you live for?  What keeps you going?  I wanted to ask these questions of my readers, but I wanted to ask them without having to answer them myself.  So I mulled some more.

I realized that if I posted this list of questions without delving into it myself, people would make some assumptions about what’s behind the questions.  People would, perhaps not so much answer the questions as try to offer me encouragement, or solutions, or hope against whatever they presumed my motivation for asking might have been.  But here’s the thing.  I’m not sure I know the answers to the questions for myself and that’s the reason I’m asking.

Yes, I want to compare myself to your answers, but I don’t want to compare myself to your answers.  That sentence, of course, makes no sense to anyone but me.  See, a very stereotypical depressive behavior is comparing oneself:  Oh, he’s better looking than I am.  She makes more money than I do.  I wish my hair looked like his. And all that does is lead to a more and more harmful image of oneself and reinforce the negativity in their already troubled mind.  That is not what I’m trying to do here.

I thought about these questions and what my own answers might be and perhaps I’ll share them later.  I don’t want to share them now, because I don’t want my answers to influence yours and I don’t want to reinforce your potential need to “encourage” me.  That’s not what I’m looking for here.

The truth is I’ve been feeling a little better in some respects the last few days and I realized, sometime last night or this morning, what I believe is the reason why.  It is difficult to explain.  See, depression, among many other ugly little problems, is the lack of hope – wait… No it’s not.  Depression is a sense of hopelessness… It doesn’t seem like there is much of a difference, but there must be…  I’ve lived most of my life with a sense of hopelessness, and yet, I always had hope.  I always hoped for more, for something better.  I always believed that things had to get better.  The thing is that all that hope and all that believing there is something better, has just let me down over and over again.  And now, I don’t really have any hope for things to get better.  I don’t really believe that it will get any better than this and I don’t really feel hopeless exactly.

What I realized last night or this morning is that I’ve stopped “planning” and, I suppose on some level, started “accepting”.  I’ve stopped thinking about what life is going to be like “when such and such happens”.  I suppose in a way that kind of planning is the same as comparing; comparing my life now, to this vision of what my life could be if… It seems like that is a good thing, and yet, without planning, I’m not sure what I’m aiming for.

Anyway, I decided to ask these questions of you because I wanted to get another perspective, to get out of my own head a little, and maybe get a better glimpse at reality.

And I’ll admit that there is another, ulterior motive that plays a small part, a very small part.  There are still a lot more people reading this blog than ever actually comment on it.  And that’s fine.  I don’t comment on every single blog post I read.  Sometimes I think I should, but I don’t always have anything to say, or feel like I have anything to say that really adds value to what I’ve just read.

But I’m asking, if you’re reading this post, if you’ve gotten this far, please answer the questions, even if you never have and never will again comment on my blog.  If you don’t feel comfortable answering the questions in a comment, then please, send them to me in an e-mail to Riggledo at gmail dot com.  I promise to keep it confidential.

So the questions are:

What gets you out of bed in the morning?  (Not your alarm, but your motivation.)

What do you believe is your purpose in life?  What is your reason for living?

What do you live for?  What keeps you going?

I know that many of you would answer “My kids” to at least one of those questions and I’m not suggesting that kids aren’t a valid answer, but kids are secondary.  Kids come later in life, by choice (usually) and, well…  “Kids” is just too easy an answer.  I’m asking you to dig deeper than that.  I want to know what it is about your life that makes life worthwhile for you, not for someone else.

I also know that these questions kind of point to each other so don’t feel like you have to give me a hundred word essay under each of those questions (though you’re welcome to), just tell me your story.  Tell me what makes your life worth living each and every day.  I hope you’ll all do my little interview.  I’m looking forward to your answers…

Please?  I’ll be your best friend… 😉

But I Think It’s About Forgiveness

~ riggledo ~ 5 Comments

I thought writing this would be easy.  I listened to the song for hours and hours and when I realized I just wasn’t fully getting the lyrics I looked them up so I could read along and then I listened to it for hours and hours more.  I really felt something while I listened.  I was ready to write about it but I needed (or at least I thought I did) to give some back story first.  So I wrote.  I wrote and wrote and wrote and when I was “finished”, I hadn’t written about my feelings at all, but instead wrote about a concert I didn’t enjoy and an artist I had no interest in and then I copied and pasted the lyrics to a song you’ve probably all heard for yourselves before, and I left you with a promise to get to the real point in another post… soon… because I chose to believe that you really wanted to know.

But time has not been on my side and while I enjoyed listening to the song, how many days can you listen to the same song over and over again without going bat-shit crazy?  I moved on and listened to other music, and did my actual job, and wrote brief, relatively meaningless posts about head and pianos… Or something like that… Now I’m sitting at my computer and I’m ready to write this post and I played the song again and I’ve got the lyrics in front of me and—Nothing!

Wait.  I’ll listen a few more times.

Something is happening…

I thought this was worth writing because the feelings were pretty strong and yet not easy to identify.  Now, two days later, that feeling is starting to come back, but it’s slow.

What follows is bound to be more of a stream of consciousness thing than I had intended and if you’re bored already, I won’t be offended if you stop reading here.  I make no promises about the quality of the rest of this post.  For those of you who are gluttons for punishment…

I listen to the song while doing other things and it seeps into my sub-conscious, but the lyrics aren’t readily thought about, and I notice a bit of a melancholy comes over me.  The music is soothing and the singing voice is almost comforting.  Maybe consoling is a better word.  I can feel the emotion of the song.  I do feel the emotion of the song.  A sort of… mournful hope, painful optimism and to be honest it’s not entirely comfortable to feel.  Maybe it’s the juxtaposition of the spectrum of feelings mashing up against one another or maybe it’s because I don’t know how to handle my feelings in the first place and so feeling anything is at once exciting and horrifying.

As the feeling starts to wash over me I become more aware of the lyrics.  A word here: forgiveness, happiness, self-assurance; a phrase there: “The more I learn, the less I understand and all the things I thought I figured out, I have to learn again”, “gotta put it all behind you, ‘cause life goes on.  You keep carrying that anger, it’ll eat you up inside.”

And then, the song in its entirety:

“I got the call today I didn’t want to hear, but I knew that it would come.  An old true friend of ours was talkin’ on the phone.  She said you found someone.”

I can imagine the heartbreak of that moment.  I’ve experienced the heartbreak of that moment.  I hear that line and I think of the day a mutual friend of my ex-fiancé and mine wandered into the store in the mall where I worked and told me that my ex and her new guy were getting married later on that evening.  I knew she had a new guy and I knew they were engaged so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise and yet, it felt more like a kick to the gut.

Then again, that was a lifetime ago and I’m a completely different person than I was then.  I’m over that hurt.  I can relate to and imagine the heartbreak of that moment, but I don’t feel it now.

“And I thought of all the bad luck and all the struggles we went through; how I lost me and you lost you.  What are all these voices outside love’s open door, make us throw off our contentment and beg for something more?

I’ve been learning to live without you now, but I miss you sometimes. The more I know, the less I understand.  All the things I thought I knew, I’m learning them again.”

The last line strikes a chord these days because I feel exactly that way.  I thought I had made such progress in my life.  I felt like I had learned so much from therapy and experience and time, and now, I feel like everything I thought I knew has been a lie, like I’m back at square one.  The more I know about me, about whom I am and the life I’ve lived, the less I understand… pretty much anything.  I’m not even sure anymore what I’ve learned.

“I’ve been trying to get down to the heart of the matter, but my will gets weak and my thoughts seem to scatter.”

It has been a recurring phenomenon for me, in life and particularly in therapy, that when things get tough, my brain shuts down.  Quite literally, when things become too hard to face, or information becomes too complicated and overwhelming, my brain just stops processing.  It’s difficult to even articulate the experience.  I lose the ability to focus on the task or the issue at hand and it’s almost like the mental imagery breaks apart and scatters in all directions like oil on water.  I’ve always felt like I was the only one who felt that so this lyric of the song, in a way, is comforting.

“But I think it’s about forgiveness.  Forgiveness.  Even if, even if you don’t love me anymore.”

It almost seems like this is goes without saying.  Forgiveness is difficult.  It shouldn’t be.  It should be the easiest thing in the world but it just isn’t.  I can’t speak for other people and I’m sure I’m not really the only person to feel the way I do, but I am the only one I have to worry about and the fact is, very few days have gone by in my life where I wasn’t hurt or degraded or let down in some way, by some one.  I’ve had a considerable amount of hurt in my life and have every reason to expect a considerable amount more.  It’s hard to get over.  It’s tough to put behind you and I think no matter how much you wish you could, you don’t forget the hurts in your life.

For me, and thousands if not millions of people like me, the possibility that someone incredibly important in my life might not love me anymore if they knew everything there was to know, is too great to be ignored.  The part that’s so confusing and difficult about all this is they’re some of the same people who have caused the most pain and sadness in my life.

“These times are so uncertain.  There’s a yearning undefined, and people filled with rage.  We all need a little tenderness.  How can love survive in such a graceless age?”

Uncertainty is such a huge part of life and it sucks.  I’ve lived most of my life feeling like I have little or no control over anything.  And it’s not that I’m a “control freak” exactly, although, really isn’t everyone to some extent?  It’s just that, so much of the time, I feel like circumstances just happen to me.  That sounds like a cop-out, I know, but it’s true.  It makes me sound like a victim, and maybe in some ways I am, but it makes me angry… one might say, “filled with rage.”

And it seems like we live in an age of me-ness.  “Graceless”?  That’s just putting it nicely.  I’ve been so disturbed and frustrated over the last several years by the general attitude of selfishness and self-importance in the world around me.  Once upon a time, you could go to a store and the employees would speak to you.  “Excuse me,” they would say before walking in front of you as you examine the products on the shelf.  “May I help you find anything?” they would ask, simply because you walked near them.  (I worked at a store once that had a “four square” policy.  If a customer walked with-in four floor tiles of you in any direction you were supposed to greet them and offer assistance.)

And what about your fellow man?  There was a time when people paid attention to where they were going, when it wasn’t more important for them to get where they wanted to be, than it was to be courteous enough to wait until you got by when there was no one behind you. Now, people turn their carts out in front of you and make you stop short, or cut you off on the freeway, just to get out from behind the slow guy in front of them, even though they’re going slower than you.  I think this sums it up pretty well.

“And the trust and self-assurance that lead to happiness are the very things we kill, I guess.  Pride and competition cannot fill these empty arms.  And the wall they put between us, you know it doesn’t keep us warm.”

I wouldn’t presume to say that I know what leads to happiness.  Most of the time I think that people are either born happy or they’re not; and while everyone has bummer days, tragic moments that temporarily sour their moods, those of us who weren’t fortunate enough to be born happy, probably never will be.

Trust and self-assurance are things that have very rarely, if ever, served me well so I’m not so sure those lead to happiness.  These last few years have been filled with self-assurance and it has only proved to set me up for a huge fall.  Lead to happiness?  I’m not so sure.  “The very things we kill, I guess”?  It evokes a sense of loss in me.  However artificial that trust and self-assurance I had been experiencing might have been, it was still significant and now it’s gone.

I don’t know about “pride and competition” but the image of empty arms and “doesn’t keep us warm” conjures plenty of feeling.  One I’m all too familiar with.  It’s called loneliness.  I’m used to it; one might even say I’m comfortable with it.  Which is not to say that I like it, but when it’s all you’ve known, it’s pretty easy to settle in for the long haul.

“I’ve been trying to live without you now, but I miss you, baby.  The more I know, the less I understand, and all the things I thought I figured out, I have to learn again.  I’ve been trying to get down to the heart of the matter, but my will gets weak and my heart is so shattered.”

All the things I thought I figured out.  It’s just a change in the wording, but it’s so much more accurate.  Clearly everything I thought I knew turned out to be wrong.  Deceiving myself into believing things would be different when they clearly won’t.  All the hope I allowed myself to feel, all the optimism that proved to be groundless…  My heart is so shattered

“But I think it’s about forgiveness.  Forgiveness.  Even if, even if you don’t love me anymore.”

Now check out the bridge:

“All the people in your life who’ve come and gone, they let you down, you know they hurt your pride.  Gotta put it all behind you ‘cause life goes on.  You keep carryin’ that anger, it’ll eat you up inside.

I wanted happily ever after, and my heart is so shattered and I know it’s about…”

At the end of the day, this, right here, is what I think this song is about for me.  I could make lists.  Lists of people who’ve gone, lists of people who’ve let me down and lists of people who’ve hurt me.  Lists of people who’ve made me angry, made me resentful, made me doubt myself and my life and the world around me.  I try everyday to put it behind me, though I’m generally not very successful.  “Life goes on?”  What life?  I struggle a lot with this one and it’s actually prompted what will probably be tomorrow’s post if I can get it together in time.

“You keep carrying that anger, it’ll eat you up inside.”  This evokes thoughts of my mother and to be honest, it makes me angry.  My whole life when I would get mad about something, she would say, “Oh honey, just be quiet.  Don’t be like that.  You’re not hurting anyone but yourself.”  Maybe it wasn’t her intention, but I think it was.  What I got from that is.  “Don’t feel.  It’s not OK to get angry.  You’re not allowed to have negative emotions.”  It’s kind of ironic if you think about it.  “You keep carrying that anger, it’ll eat you up inside,” is true.  It’s so much better to vent your frustrations, to let it out of your system and yet, the words make me think of my mother telling me not to do just that.

My mother and I had a bit of a falling out several years ago and I’m not going to get into it here, but in that conversation she told me “You’ve obviously been holding some grudges you need to forgive and forget.”  Naturally, that just pissed me off more, but what I told her is, “I’m not holding any grudges.  I suppose I can understand why you would say that, but that’s not the case.  When I gave the examples I gave, it was simply that, giving examples.  I learned a long time ago not to make sweeping generalizations (especially within this family) without supporting data.  As far as ‘forgive and forget’ goes, I don’t even know what that means.  Forgiveness is a choice and I’ve made that choice over and over again with a lot of people in my life for as long as I can remember.  Forgetting on the other hand doesn’t make any sense to me.  One can’t control what they can and can’t (or do and don’t) remember.”

I believed that when I said it.  I believed that forgiveness was a conscious decision you make.  I guess the truth is I still believe that and yet this song struck a chord with me.

Maybe forgiveness is a process.  Maybe forgiveness is a decision and a process.  Maybe forgiveness is a process that takes time and you make the decision over and over until – well, until your done.

I’ve been trying to get down to the heart of the matter, but my will gets weak and my thoughts seem to scatter.  But I think it’s about forgiveness…

Forgiveness.