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A Very Merry Variant

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Turning calendar pages and looking forward to a future without daily reminders that humanity is on the verge of annihilation…a hopeful, tasty dish dashed when another one of Mother Nature’s tireless foot soldiers brought heavy artillery to our collective knife fight.

With each lap around that big, bright glowing ball spinning well outside our stratosphere, we meager humans are given the opportunity to take a momentary inventory of our most burning existential quandaries. Do we continue to plod along like obedient ants, resting in the rut of routine and ritual? Do we finally unsheathe the bats and clubs and take a swing for the fences drawing the border between our inclination toward convention and our dreams? Or do we burn the playbook altogether, eschewing any semblance of strategy, and watch those chips land however and wherever they please?

Regardless of the size of the soaring stacks sitting proudly at our opponent’s hands, there’s always the chance that an ace will show its face. We cannot predict the unpredictable, and crystal balls are often crying out for cleaning. History books aren’t written in the moment, so some distance, time, and perspective are prerequisites to fill the pages of this tome.

Any advice to sit back, relax, and watch the wolf blow your house apart is understandably met with resistance. But there’s no room for oxygen when your lungs are full of seawater. We simply have to wait out the wave.

May this year be an unreserved aversion to the new normalcy. May we travel upstream to investigate what’s intentionally being dumped at the top to kill us at the bottom. May we finally care enough to strike a balance on this planet before the scales are so tilted we all slide into the fire. May we hold tightly to what matters most and preserve those fleeting flickers of hope sparkling in the distant dark.

May tomorrow always be a little bit better than today.

Adolescence Interrupted

Fatherless, Childless

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I recently realized I am in a fairly unique position. There is no paternal bond left in my life. Both of my grandfathers are gone, my father is deceased, and I have no children. I’m sure this is not a wildly rare situation, but it’s one that lends itself to some introspective examination.

I wasn’t raised with a father, so I can’t speak to the notion of men needing other men to cultivate a fully-formed human. There wasn’t a bigger, harrier version of me handing over a playbook with keys to the testosteronic kingdom.

I’m sure I may have missed a few lessons along the way. I probably can’t throw a solid jab. There is no desire to attend strip clubs, kill animals for sport, or sit at a poker table, and I’d rather intentionally collapse my trachea than sleep outdoors in a tent.

But from a macroscopic level, there may be a fundamental disconnect when the bloodline comes untethered.

The long-lasting psychological implications germinating in a mind left alone to wander the world are above my pay grade, but there is certainly something absent. Finding a sense of peace as the calendar pages are torn becomes more of a priority than second-guessing specific decisions made along the journey. The “what ifs” are heartbreakers, but “what’s next” is fuel.

This stage will be tackled like all the rest, and I’ll find my footing on an icy staircase leading to some version of actualization, however faded that picture appears when I finally (hopefully) arrive.

We are driven by our core instincts and the only job we have is to listen. The answers come from the quiet voices in the shadowy recesses of our mind.

We simply need to remember that those whispers are screams.

Adolescence Interrupted