The River

8:35pm Starbucks in Poughkeepsie.

Last Sunday I spontaneously decided to drive home to Connecticut for the day. It was a beautiful sunny morning and I’d awoken early to drive a friend to the train station, so I just grabbed some clothes and kept going. My father had a gig playing guitar at a local restaurant so I stopped in. And while I was there, he played me a song.

“The River” by Bruce Springsteen is a song that’s recently grown close to my heart. Despite its notoriety, I never noticed this song until I heard my father play it one  rainy night last summer. I sat quietly in the dim bar, mesmerized by the lyrics, the haunting melody, the heartbreaking story of a man who falls in love so young and has to grow up so fast, yet, he always recalls the passions and dreams of his innocent youth.

The man in the song isn’t me but this past Sunday, as I listened to my father play that poignant melody and tell that story, I couldn’t help but reflect. I thought about my own dreams and my own ideas of home. That is, Home with a capital “H,” the idea of home, the feeling I feel when I’m home rather than some specific place. There have been times I’ve thought that people were Home to me. I had dreams and aspirations and ideas about our future and those notions too, were Home to me. Sometimes I even allowed myself the comfortable belief - as long as I’m with this person, I will never feel a deep longing for home because they will be my Home. Perhaps the collapse of that idea is this week’s, maybe even this year’s lesson to me. Just as the world turns, rivers dry up, trees grow and places change, so do people. So do I. It makes you wonder what you can count on if everything is changing all the time. If you can’t count on your places, your people, your ideas or even yourself to remain the same, what then can you really count on?

Isn’t it awfully frightening? It grabbed hold of me like an unyielding current when I heard those Springsteen lyrics insisting on the fallibility of the dreams we hold so dear.

I’m recognizing how deeply I’ve clung to those aspirations, those expectations of myself, of others, of my world, of my relationships. And I’m recognizing that as heartbreaking as it may be to release these expectations, as vulnerable and emotionally naked as it might leave me, perhaps it’s best. Life will dash our expectations and all of those other things we cling to whether we are prepared for it or not. As the song incants, “Now all them things that seemed so important, well mister they vanished right into the air.” It’s so uncomfortable to let go. I do not like to let go. I do not like to feel set adrift. I miss my life rafts – that my home wouldn’t change, that my friends wouldn’t change, that my relationships wouldn’t change. I long for the naive state of being I once occupied.

Yet, at least for right now, I am lucky enough to live on the banks of a river. Like the man in the song, something (some force of God I imagine) often “sends me down to the river.” To remember the ever changing nature of the world, to feel my own smallness and to once again, as many times as I need to be reminded, stand in awe of it all.

Maybe Home with a capital “H” has to remain just that – a concept. Maybe we can’t cling to it. Maybe it changes just like everything and everyone. Maybe our peace can only be found in the recognition and acceptance of its change as we remain awestruck by whatever it is that continually sends us “down to the river.”

Thanks for the song Dad.

Untangling

10:06pm. The Basement of the Marist College Library in Poughkeepsie.

I’ve been thinking about myself a lot this past week – about who I am and who I want to become, about how I handle situations, about how much I think. I’ve been thinking a lot about last week’s blog too. So many people I love called, emailed, and texted to tell me how wonderful they think I am, how much they love me and how deserving they think I am. One person in particular, however, one that I love very much, told me how right I was. How arrogant, how undeserving, how terrible, how selfish. It was tough to hear because as much as I knew these things about myself, as much as I could write them down and post them on the Internet for all to see and comment on, I didn’t (and in ways still don’t) want to recognize them myself. I wanted to kick my own ass and then have everybody who loves me tell me I’d been too hard on myself. I love to be right but I wasn’t prepared to hear someone say I was right about this.

Back in Italy I wrote a post about reaching a piazza in my life and I pondered the extent to which I had allowed my world to shape me as opposed to how much I’ve allowed myself the opportunity to shape my world. It makes me feel like I’ve gotten nowhere to be reexamining this concept 8 months later. But here I am. This is what it all comes down to this week (and probably, to my great displeasure, for many weeks to come). What hurt wasn’t that someone agreed with me about how little I felt I deserved my car and the people in my life. What hurt was that it made me realize the extent to which I allow the feeling of others to shape my world, my perceptions and my actions. And I came to this: for all the self-reflection I do and despite all of these blog posts – I don’t know much about me. I got so hung up on how others would respond, if they would care or agree, that I didn’t take into account how I felt about me. And in the end, I’m the one that has to be with myself day in and day out, so, how I feel about myself matters. It matters so much.

Don’t get me wrong; I still care about everyone else. Their feelings still matter. But I am responsible for me, so I should know how I feel about myself. Even as I write this, I was only prompted to do so by someone else. The fact is I don’t know what I think of the person I am, which is a little sad considering I write about her every week.

Maybe I don’t always think I’m so awful, maybe some of you out there agree that I’m not, maybe you disagree. Right now, this week, I don’t care. I’m just trying to figure out what it is I think about me. There are many people out there who are self-aware. Maybe you’re one of them. Lucky you (and also, bite me – but I love you because you help me know me, but also please stop that). If you’re not one of these self-aware people though, if you are just like me and you’ve been winding your opinions of yourself so tightly around others opinions of you to the point that they are one frighteningly entangled mass, then my advice to us is – perhaps we should stop. It’s really advice to myself (as I have no authority upon which to give advice to others). Life is an ever-flowing, ever-changing river; the people we love won’t always be there to keep us straight. Self-reflection and self-progression, in the end, can only be done by oneself. And it’s so hard sometimes to do things alone. To be alone. But it’s so important and it’s so underrated. I think. Maybe. I’m trying to figure it out.