Cafe Hitch-hike

2018-02-26

A closed case vs. a cold case

The ride back to the old town, redux:

I made the jump... zero confidence in my employer... broken heart... grief... turned out to be a symptom of deeper, unhealed issues.

I just recently started to see... I ran away. I literally ran away. It seemed lucrative in terms of pay, novelty, and starting over, but 3 years later, I see I just ran away.

It hit me to see that I ran away. I wasn't a complete idiot for doing it. It seemed like a feasible solution to my woes. I honestly didn't know or understand what I was feeling at the time. I thought I just had to suck it up, Buttercup. Eat that frog. You tell your feelings whose boss, don't let them get the upper hand! If I faced what troubled me honestly and squarely, I could had found different solutions that didn't involve uprooting my life.

I also thought what I was doing at the time was the sensible thing to do. Starting over, a chance of scenery, all those things to get a fresh start!

The other part... maybe I needed to go down these paths to be able to see what I now see. Maybe I needed to meet certain people who gave me new perspectives that help me put it together. Maybe these were necessary roads to travel. Maybe running away was the actual path I was supposed to be on for that time in my life.

The funny thing was that some of the answers that perplexed me for so long were around me but in pieces. The gurus always say the answer isn't outside of yourself but either very close or within. I knew little bits, pieces and insights floated around, but I never knew their full significance or how they fit. I had to put them together first, or maybe something else needed to happen for them to make sense, kind of like needing a lesson first before interpretation was possible.

Running away... Hah. My family are experts at that. It's probably in my genes along with the Irish and Jewish DNA I had no idea I had.

I ran away an awful lot in my life, starting with people and various relationships (but not all of them!). I also have enough occasions and situations where I didn't. I stood up and faced many situations and people, and sometimes fought to their end. I sometimes stopped when I saw it got me nowhere. I took some scrapes and sometimes knocked it out, or staggered away the better for it after licking my wounds. At least I know I'm not a complete coward.

I think the difference between running away and honestly closing a chapter is a sense of completeness. Just about all of the major questions or concerns about a situation make sense, and there is little need to take them any further. Maybe residues of hard feelings remain, but those usually fade; they aren't forgotten, just recalled at weird times before fading below our attention without provoking much in the subconscious. All that needed to be examined had been, and it's like the case is closed.

Running away is when things are left unfinished, unsaid, unsolved, and not very well understood. The unsaid and unsolved things float around and latch themselves onto a part of the subconscious and become worse. They demand attention and then we fight it or repress it. Running away takes immense stores of energy to keep it going!

I'd say the difference between running away or closing is what is done to put it in its place. The difference between a closed and a cold case is a closed case has some semblance of organization and is placed in an archive. A cold case is clumsily stashed in some random storage space with the hopes that it will be forgotten or lost, and yet the mystery remains. Running away is a cold case, and a closed case is a closed case.

What about the things that just cannot be solved despite diligent or soulful efforts? Well, that is where good ol' Serenity Prayer comes in. It's not so much asking God but the power of life and the universe to, "accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." This is all I can say at this point.

downwind | upstream