Beginnings

Fortunately I flew on New Years Eve and didn’t have to fly on New Years Day. I managed to sleep in for a few hours. I haven’t actually done anything to celebrate the occasion for a few years but this time I headed out with some friends and their friends and had a good time. Usually I don’t like being around a lot of drinking and drunks but they were all happy drunks so it wasn’t too bad.

But I was awake long enough to welcome in the new year by watching the most incredible sunrise, and lucky me, I just happened to have half a dozen pretty girls packed into my truck with me. They had guns too! In spite of all of the beautiful company for some reason as I sat out there in the still of the dawn, my mind began to wander and a wave of melancholy suddenly swept over me. I’m not sure where it came from but memories and faces of people that I haven’t thought of in a long time came flooding back. This past year has pretty difficult for me personally. I’ve lost a few friends, more friends and relatives are going through really rough times and I worry so much about them, sometimes it gets to be a bit much. My way of handling that has been to keep myself so busy that I don’t have time to worry too much, and for the most part it works. But then there are those moments. Sometimes they come late at night as I’m trying to sleep, and sometimes they just sneak up out of the blue.

It is much more innocent than it sounds but we all sat in my truck that was parked way out in one of my little secret spots that I go to when I want to get away from it all. The girls in the back were sleeping and I sat in the front next to a girl and I watched through the windshield as the black of the horizon silently began to shimmer with gold, then gradually the wispy clouds overhead in the stratosphere took on a thousand stunning shades of dawn. Evidently I was staring pretty hard because I heard a soft, faint “hey…” but it didn’t register. She said it again and I looked at her and realized that she was holding my hand and had been watching me. With a penetrating gaze and with the softest and most gentle voice I’ve ever heard she said in a near whisper, “It’s tough, isn’t it?” With a gentle squeeze of my hand she smiled and turned back to the sunrise and there we sat in silence for the next 20 minutes or so until the creatures in the back began to stir. It wasn’t a romantic moment but it was quite moving. Thinking back and trying to find words to do the moment justice, the thought just keeps coming back that what drove all of the doldrums and sadness away was the gentle compassion and a few soft-spoken words of a sympathetic stranger that I’ll most likely never see again but for whom I am immensely grateful.

While the uniquely feminine gentleness that this beautiful girl displayed is not a trait that I am capable of, not without a lot of practice anyway lol, nonetheless it was exemplary behavior worth emulating. I wonder if this year there will be someone in need of my sympathies. So of all the usual resolutions, chief among them will be to get outside of my own bubble enough to take note of the needs of those around me. At least that’s a start.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad way to start the year.