Upsight

It might just be that there’s nowhere else for me to be. I’m just here. I’m in this place, at this time, with these people, and under these circumstances. 

I have so many ideas about a better, more fulfilling, less strained situation that I might have wound up in, or that I imagine I would like to find myself in, but they are only ideas. Each, if realized, would necessarily bring with it innumerable stresses, strains, frustrations, and regrets, begetting yet more ideation about further alternate scenarios. 
Or maybe they wouldn’t. There’s actually no way to know. 

But I do know that I am here, right now. Here and now is full of problems and pain and regrets and anxieties and miseries and dread. Here and now is also just fine. Here and now also has its joys and releases and creations and surprises and fulfillments and upsights. 

And even if it didn’t, even if it doesn’t, it’s still the only here and now available to me. This is when and where I am. 

I think that might be okay. 

I am who I am, the amalgamation of almost 40 years of experiences—those had, avoided, and missed. I made a lot of choices, and sometimes chose not to choose. Those choices have now been made, and they’re done. Those choices, experiences, both had and not had, led to me, right now, right here, writing this. 

And there’s no other way it could be. There were infinite opportunities in the past at which different choices could have been made so that something else might have been, but no longer. I am this person with these flaws and these talents and these thoughts and these inclinations and these loves and these hates and these fears and these hopes and these traumas and these disorders, in this body with its shape and color and weight and usefulness and potential and injuries and atrophies and scars and conditions and strength and genes and state of decay. I have literally nothing else to work with, nor could it be any other way. Maybe it might have been some other ways, perhaps fewer than infinite, but they are, all of them, irrelevant now. 

This is where and when and who I ended up. And this is where and when and who I start with now. 

I still think that might be okay.