BrightOptimisticCynicalCurious

The weather, apropos to February and March, has been malleable. One day it is 70 degrees, the next the high is 45. Today it was cold, high more like 40, maybe, and windy, low tonight in the low 20s. I still hung laundry out on the line. Now that is cold.

But on a recent warm day I had this epiphany. See, it was sunny, warm but not too warm (60ish), crisp like fall but warm like spring -- a day out of any season. A perfect day. That’s what kept going through my head -- a perfect day.

And being a perfect day, it reminded me of every good day that ever was. I remembered viscerally what individual days from years past actually felt like. I remembered what it felt like to actually be young, when the whole world was nothing but possibility, potentiality.

Truth be told, I still feel the same inside, that bright optimistic cynical curious imperious and somewhat buffaloed kid. But there are ways in which age has snuck up on me. There is a constriction with age, a sense that choices have been made, die’s cast, lots chosen, and that with that, some things just are not possible any more. There are some senses of diminishment, lessening. And then there is the unsettling sensation of looking in the mirror sometimes and seeing not yourself but your mother’s nipples, jowl, back of hand.

But I digress. On that perfect day, I caught a glimpse, if just for that moment in time, that all of aging is a myth, that infinite potentials still exist infinitely. Making one choice may change the next set of choices, but it doesn’t limit them -- if you can follow that.

One of the things that frustrates me most when dealing with other people is how limited most people think their choices are. There are so many reasons for this, highest among them their own sense of “it isn’t my fault”, but truth be told, for any given choice there are always hundreds of possibilities. And so while at 44, having built a house to my real specification (that satisfies me), I am unlikely to choose to build a house again -- there’d be no reason to. But that isn’t a limit on the possibilities. In fact, having procured my shelter, I can now pursue other things.

So that whole constriction/diminishment thing showed itself to me as illusion that perfect day, and I was filled with the sense that, yes, every dream I’d ever dreamed was still on the table if I wanted it to be.

In the front swamp that night there were frogs, FROGS, singing -- although singing is a charitable term for their noise -- more like beating hollow sticks together or something -- but still music to my ears. Any warm day and they are there. Any cold day and they are not. Like hope. Except those frogs are really there too, all the time.

Like the kernel of yourself that is real and isn’t playing dress-up.