New Journal
This journal has been a part of me since April 21st, 2003-nearly nine years now.
I haven't written as much as I have wanted to in this journal, but I've come a long way and, inspired by so many moments, I hope to record that history now more than ever.
God, how much my life has changed, how all the changes have come in revolutionary waves and scarcely were they subtle shifts I could gradually acclimate to, how I equated change with discomfort and pain, how I have feared change all the while knowing that change is the one immutable law of the universe, how I eventually accepted every change that would inevitably take place, despite my fight for control, with so much gratitude once I had made peace with having to part with whatever I was holding onto, reluctant to let go of whatever I knew so well fearing some unknown space would invade my all too familiar little world of secured-comfort and shake things up a bit. The hard way I always learned that sometimes I need to sit with that pain, that being with that pain is necessary, if, that is, I'm wanting to grow through it and build character.
I look back at my earliest entries-I didn't have a clue how to live about how to be a person; that was far, far away from me.
I look back at those entries and, from the present moment, there is this perspective of humility-I could have been totally wrong about everything I wrote and thought, but certainly not about what I felt. The way I strangely felt human with the fleeting of Anita in my life has forever left an impression that there was undeniably a luminescent period I was fighting to be alive perhaps more than any other and that will serve as proof that I existed.
...
I've managed to average 84-miles per week of hard running these last six months of my life and I've had a lot of time to not-think, to simply listen to what I sound like on the inside.
Today I feel as if I have a duty to contribute to my to life to have-and to create-a positive experience. Joy is really not underrated in my worldview. I literally feel at times overcome with joy and that's really what the experience of change has given me-a taste for the joy of living and a pursuit for all the good things. With every change that took place in my life I was able to see what's possible and whether or not I wanted it.
Perhaps it's no longer about turning pages, but about having the courage to write with a new language.
Moving forward, I believe the time has come to move forward from this journal and open the vault of another one where I can write more readily from my inventory of daily affairs: the texture of my life, the habits that fill my unconventional approach to living, my direction and orientation to the space I create to keep a simplified kind of existence, my human comedy, my social spaces, the genealogy of my values, the things that make me care about caring, the places I lose and then find myself in, the mileage I track, and simply put, the conceivable reasons for getting up in the morning.
