On The Brink

Dear Mom,

So I know that you asked me to write you something a while back, and I have yet to actually do it.  I have known all along that I wanted to write something that describes the way I have been feeling lately, to capture it; box in the feelings with words so they wouldn’t pass unexamined.  But to do this required a self understanding that has taken some time to achieve.  Remember what I wrote, when I was maybe ten, that I felt like an open book just waiting to be written in?  Well here I am, ten years later, and that ten year old wisdom has come back to shed light on my current psychological condition.

I have felt restless, anxious, an immense impatience writhing beneath the surface of everything that I have been doing lately.  I watched a movie tonight with Vaughan, her brother and everybody, and after it was done this monstrous, restless impatience came to me again, and I really felt that my mood was matched to the storming energy of the rain and pounding surf outside.  So I sat out there, and just thought for a while…and words started to come to me.  I realized I feel like I am on the brink, on the cusp of some unknown but wondrous realm.  It is as if I have crawled to the edge of the filtered and muted world of childhood and will soon be free to dive into the river of raw life experience and let it take me where it will. 

As I sat watching the surf, those words of ten years ago came back, and I thought that they almost describe how I feel now, but something was not quite right.  I no longer feel like a book filled with blank pages.  Now I feel like the initial chapters had been written.  I, as the protagonist in my own story, have grown, shown enormous promise, become a man capable of riding the currents of raw life experience with strength and grace and an appreciation for the joy that is life.  The build up of my story has been set, the hero has made it through the pitfalls of childhood and the awkwardness of adolescence and any one who reads what has been written cannot help but agree that the rest of the story shows tremendous promise. 

But it is as if the author has left the character here, at this stage, poised to toss his potential into the flow of life and ride it through tears of sadness, pain, redemption, joy, and the legacy, great or small, that he will leave in his wake.  The character has yet to experience any mountains or chasms, he has merely trained himself to deal with that terrain on smaller hills and valleys.  This is not to say that his life has been uneventful, but the character’s sensitivity has always been buffered by the safely limited bounds of his self-introspection. 

When I was young there was time for everything, so I needed nothing.  I did not know how to love, in the full blown romantic sense of the word, and I did not know how to feel loss.  While this undeniably helped me stay centered in trying times, it also took some of the adventure out of life. 

As I have gotten older, life, adulthood, does not seem like it is an eternity away or an eternity in itself.  It feels like it is here now, and mortality is no longer a shadow I am intellectually capable of dismissing as a small, ominous darkening on the horizon.  And with that has grown a desire, which has grown into a need: I need to experience the fullness of life.  The dynamic of my relationships have completely shifted as things which can merely be replaced or moved beyond in the eons of time became finite things which must be cherished and nurtured and appreciated. 

As such, I have grown susceptible to loss.  And while my connection to the relationships I currently maintain changed, so to did my connection with the relationships I will have.  I began to have a need to experience that adventure of romantic relationships, of love, of heartbreak.  I know life will not seem truly full if that is not a part of it.  Where before I was self-reliant because I was self contained, now there are holes that can be torn and filled in me.  The boundaries of what I define as my essential self have expanded beyond my individual self to a ravenous desire for the drama of life that seems to know no bounds.  I have finally come to feel incomplete and small in and of myself, and perceive I have therefore grown enough to be able to love more fully than I ever have before. 

I am poised on this brink of acknowledged readiness for life to begin.  I am ready to truly start living it, and that is as far as the author of this book has gotten.  I recognize that I have that same anxious impatience that makes me read through the night just to see how a story unfolds, because the groundwork is set for the character to accomplish and experience much.  Except now it is my story I am anxious to have unfold. As much as I would like to rush through the experiencing of it to arrive at that moment at the end when the reader and the character can look back at a story well lived, and sigh with satisfaction, I know that would defeat the very outcome I hope to achieve.  So I wrestle with the energy, and the impatience writhes within me like the spirit of the man I will be trying to force his way into existence before his time. 

I am not sure if that fully encompasses what I am trying to say, but I think it puts shape to something that was merely ethereal before.  I am so excited about what my life could be that I just want it to hurry up and happen already.  In that way potential is like a drug, you can never escape it.  It is always there, being whispered into your ear by loved ones and those that want to share in light of successes supposedly on your horizon.  No matter what you achieve, how early or how well you achieve it, it can merely be viewed as an indication of the potential you have to accomplish more. 

I am trying to recognize that no matter how many stages in my life I arrive at to a chorus of “Great job, the world is your oyster now!”, that chorus will be the same at the next stage no matter what I do.  I think what I need to take away from this introspective reverie I have embarked on is that my relationship with the world has changed, and I am more receptive to it.  The faded and muted colors of my childhood world are blooming into a vibrant, sun-soaked palette.  I really do appreciate so many things with an acuteness that astounds me, and I need to slow down and let myself be filled by that acuteness.  But like I said, I have acquired a thirst for it, and I am not so easily sated as I once was.  I can’t help but want all that life has to offer, and can’t help wanting it all now. 

Oddly, however, it is those moments in which that new appreciation is the driving force that I feel most present.  It is when I am with Bella, or talking with you, or making connection with Aunt Cherri, or playing basketball (surprise), or somehow being connected with the things that I have incorporated into my newly defined essential self that my restlessness fades, and the shadow of my future self sleeps patiently for a time.  I think it is difficult in my current location, but when I am able to leave the limited world of Nantucket, and dive back into the real world, I will come back with an understanding that I did not have before. 

The anxiousness has been lurking within me for months, but if I dedicate myself to connecting to those things which, though external, are a part of me, I will feel whole.  And the more time I spend feeling whole, the more the adventure of life will unfold, the more I will live it rather than watch it expectantly over my own shoulder.  I have to recognize that now I am a being filled with countless holes which can be filled by countless things.  All I can do is dedicate myself to all those things which make me feel whole now, and as I experience more things which fill in a hole for me, then the larger my essential self will become.  Maybe that will be how I measure the fullness of my life: by the breadth of what I loved, by the expanse of my essential self.