A First Step
I’m going on a quest. I actually may already be on one. It may have started when my wife died last August, or even before that. It may not be important. But suddenly things feel purposeful. It came to me last night. I’ve had a hard time sleeping this week. Then last night I booked 7 hours and in the second half of the night I had a dream about my wife. Non-specific really, but it was her.
As I lay there, mulling over the dream, and how people would say it was her when I talked about it, I got to thinking about spiritual stuff, and from there I went to Thomas Aquinas, St. Paul, St. Francis, and even the Buddha and not in any specific order. I was just thinking about people who had revelations and ideas, which got me to thinking about an article a friend sent me, The Transformational Effects of Bereavement, and that, in turn, got me to Joseph Campbell, and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which is how I figured I was on a quest.
Anyway, I’ve been worried that dwelling on how I feel after my wife’s death may seem sort of morbid and off-putting to people who read my scribbles, but now that I’m on a quest, we might actually be going somewhere. And journeys like that have value, at least in the sense you know that at some point they’ll end, but you also learn things along the way. And who knows what I’ll discover. I’ve already had a couple of ideas and we’ll get to those later. At the moment, however, it simply feels good to be pointing somewhere because it most likely means, I’ll be the one to determine when I get there. Right now, control feels good.