Substantially More Questions Than Answers

Even though every word I am about to write is true, I still believe deep down that things will be well with me in the end. That's because every time I have felt on the brink of a life-changing, irreversible disaster(s), something has happened, someone has stepped in, and/or God has intervened to prevent it, and for that, I remain eternally and immeasurably grateful.

The above notwithstanding, it seems like the longer I live, I get another 50 questions for everything I think I figure out as something along the lines of even a quasi-answer, and it's an exponential and occasionally draining process because my mind never seems to shut down. The best analogy I can make is from The Terminator, where the computer "learns at a geometric rate", which sounds all fine and dandy because that helps humanity for a while, right up until the moment the machines turn on the humans and launch the nukes that almost wipe out our entire species.

Also, I can't help but notice that right about the time I have made peace with the way a situation has turned out, more often than not, something about that situation gets tweaked in a way that the peace I thought I just found is gone because the script has been flipped and the entire equation changed...warrants mentioning.

My vision of life seems as an experience roughly equivalent to watching a TV show on a television inside an aquarium or a toilet. I know there's something I am supposed to be seeing there, that there's something going on, complete with a plot, a storyline, and best of all, a resolution...only, it's blurry. Things are a little off, and appear as they do when I try to read something without my glasses. Even with my best efforts to focus, the unclarity remains.

Then, I further survey my life and experiences in general, and I feel like the Gatorade commercial I saw on TV this week. In the commercial, the narrator says something along the lines of sports being a game of inches and seconds, and that being even a fraction of a moment off can change everything. Then it proceeds to show Montana to Clark in the Super Bowl, where the pass sails just high and the 49ers lose (instead of winning, as they actually did, thereby triggering a dynasty spanning the 80s and 90s), and another scene where Michael Jordan clangs his jump shot off the iron, handing the Cavaliers a win in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference Finals one year, stopping one of his six championship runs in its tracks (rather than swishing the shot as he did, winning the series, jumpstarting the Bulls dynasty, and sending the Cavs into a basketball funk that would last more than a decade).

I literally feel like I am and have been just that close to greatness, and not just once, but several times, and in several different areas of my life...like I'm the one who has clanged the iron or overthrown the pass by the slimmest of margins. What makes it more frustrating is that it doesn't even appear that I am so much a square peg attempting entry to a round hole, but rather that I'm a square peg...only that I'm not the right size square or that my attempted insertion takes place while the board which contains the perfect fitting hole is being pulled away.

I can't begin to describe how frustrating this is, not only because of the near misses themselves, but also because it seems to have become a pattern, which leads back to the ultimate chicken and the egg question..."Is it really (insert person, situation, etc. here), or is it me?" I pray every day that it isn't me, that I am learning something from all this going forward. I like to think I am just learning my share of difficult lessons the hard way, but I've not yet been able to shake that feeling that somehow this might not be the case.

One of my dear friends, after listening to my ramblings, said of all this, "The sooner we figure out that this is, by and large, a life of suffering, the farther down the road we will be to achieving and appreciating whatever happiness we can find in our lives, no matter how small." That may not be the ultimate right answer, but it's a fine point and a decent place to start.