“See, when you forgive your imperfections
And you’ve auctioned all your clothes
And look to see your true reflection
You will be the one who loves you the most”

                           – Brett Dennen, The One Who Loves You the Most

Brett Dennen is my new favorite singer.  Great musical ability, totally unique voice, incredible lyricist.  He really speaks to me.  And in this song specifically, he speaks how through everything, all the pain of life, he says, “I will be the one who loves you the most.”

And then, in his last verse (see above) he changes it.  YOU will be the one who loves you the most.

I desperately want to be the one who loves me the most.

I was in counseling today…we were talking about my reactions to people and events.  How I respond to conflict.  It’s pretty well known that people either do two things with conflict.  That whole fight or flight response.  My counselor said, “David, you can either fight, or you can run away.  Now…someone who fights is…what?”

“Someone with Courage,” I said without hesitation.

“And someone who runs away?”

And honestly, for the life of me, I couldn’t come up with the word.  We sat in silence while I squirmed in my seat for 5 minutes trying to come up with the word.  Eventually he said, without telling me the word, “I find it very interesting that the word is escaping you at this moment.”

But it just didn’t come.  It was on the tip of my tongue, and I just couldn’t say it.  I literally could not form the word.

Finally, he said the word.  And then he said,

“You are one.”

A friend of mine who is a nurse tells me that pain is much easier to manage if you get ahead of the game with it, and take the medications as directed, predictably, whether it hurts or not.

 It just seems that sometimes, we have to stop taking the medicine…just to make sure it still hurts.

Sometimes, if you’ve taken the medicine long enough, you decide to skip a dose, and the pain isn’t that bad.  You start to ween yourself off the meds…and the pain never really returns.  Your body has healed.  The pain has stopped.

 And then, sometimes, you take the medicine for  a while, and you decide to skip a dose, and the pain comes rushing back.  Unfortunately, when that happens, it’s sometimes even harder to get the pain back under control again.

For some reason I still have to do it.  I still have to test.  I still have to know if the pain is gone.  I have to know if I’ve healed.

Nope.  I haven’t.  It still hurts…guess I’ll take a few more doses.

I’m separated from my wife.  I’m about to be divorced.

Most of you who know me, also know that about me….but if you don’t, it’s true.  And quite honestly, it’s not that big of a deal.  There are much more dire situations occuring in the world these days.  Starvation, Wildfires, Floods, Hurricanes, Disasters, Cancer, Aids, other diseases…  These things are life and death situations.  The fact that my wife and I are terminating our marriage…not life or death.  Yes, it hurts, but it is not the end of the world.

Sometimes it feels like it though.

I think I keep expecting things to change.  Sometimes I wake up and I am furious because the sun is shining.

No….I think….Today is a gray day.

Everyday should be gray and hazy.

I expect everyone to know what has happened, and why it happened.  I’m going through all this…why should I have to explain it.  You should already know about it.

I expect time to stand still.   I think, it can’t be 3PM in the afternoon.  I didn’t sleep last night.  I tossed and turned…all night.  How on earth could time go on???

A friend of mine says that after he published his first book, he would see it on the shelves in bookstores, and think, “Well, there’s that.”  The world didn’t stop because he published his book.

Just like the world won’t stop because of this.

No matter how hard I dig my heels into the dirt, I can’t stop the world from spinning on it’s axis.  And so time passes.  A day.  Another day.  A week.  A month.  Time passes.  And each day, I curse the sun…I curse the sun for shining on my dark, dreary, gray day.

How Dare He.

Obladee, Obladah…Life goes on.

Damn you, Sun.  Damn you.