Life is Good

 

I wonder if this trip was a good idea. As I sit at day 10 or 11 of the 14 nights I’m gone I find myself wondering why, when you’re hurting and sad – suffering from another rejection, would you want to be alone, out of your element, literally in a foreign land and stuck suffering the angst of your miserable, lonely, devastated and quite frankly damaging thoughts?

It would seem that routine at this point would be the only comfort you could really have. The beauty of your everyday life, the comfort of your home, the love your friends, family and pets. To dig into your work and channel your energy and new found time into real tangible success. Why extricate yourself from the only real loves in your life to manage and process heartbreak? It almost seems foolish at this point to have traveled this far in this fragile of a mental state.

But I did it. And I’m here. And I’d like to think I’m an optimist so I’ll try to find the positive in the last few days of what feels like real suffering. Things came a bit clear to me today as I sat at a bar that was in all sense of the word “fun” drinking a drink that was literally “delicious” and staring at a beach that is in every way “beautiful,” and I cried.

Cried because I’m lonely, sad and scared. I’ve been through so much heartbreak; I just don’t know how much more I can take. And while this break up seemed so logical and was so expected, it still hurts. Almost too much to bare.

But I said I realized a few things today, and I’m going to focus on those.

1. Break ups suck. Loss hurts. Rejection and abandonment are my worsts fears. So no matter what. No matter how well I prepared myself, this was bound to hurt. I could burry myself in my work, my face in the belly of my grey cat at night, and lose my mind in senseless TV when I’m too tired to work and numb the pain.

But the pain is and was inevitable.

So my hope now is that I’ve just exponentially sped up the process. That by removing myself from my life, I was 100% free and clear to feel the pain. To let it hurt. To cry. To think. To be sad. To be remorseful. To think of all the “would-have/could-haves” to feel like a real failure at love.

The amount of time I have spent doing that these past few days would have taken months had I been distracted by my real (and honestly, very lovely) real life. I hope this has been like urgent care for a broken heart. Only I’m not numbing the pain or putting on a bandage on it, I’m really healing it by feeling it in the raw.

2. I saw a sunset tonight that may have renewed my faith in humanity, the universe and gave me some hope for my life. It was quite frankly more amazing than a Broadway show. To the right, the sun was setting. To the left, some puffy, cotton clouds were settling in over the island. As the sun set, the right got oranger and the left got pinker as the sky got darker. At one point the entire scape was lit up like fireworks. Brilliant orange. Light blue sky against cotton candy pink clouds.

Even in my terrible state of funk, I could not help but be mystified. It was breathtaking. And I watched it all from a pink li-lo from a remote beach in the Philippines. That’s pretty awesome.

But the reassuring feeling came from this…

I grew up on the beach and have pretty much lived on it since then. I’ve traveled to the world’s most amazing beaches, and visit Maui 5x for business. I’ve seen some impressive sunsets. And not that I take any of them for granted, but an amazing sunset is just a kinda cool thing I’ve been blessed enough to see more than a few times in my life. So to be left, quite frankly, speechless over a sunset tonight gives me hope.

I’ve always known that I suffer from “I know it all” and the even worse “I can do anything you can do better” syndromes. So with all the “experience” I’ve had in dating, I felt a little like I did about sunsets. I’ve ben around the block. Seen it all. What else is out there that I haven’t already experienced?

Tonight I was proved otherwise. I have notseen it all. I have not done it all. I can still be stunned, surprised, entertained, amazed and in awe. I can still lose my breath and I can still be inspired.

I have hope that this realization will quite literally translate itself into my life when I get home. I have not seen it all. There are good people out there. Life can throw lovely things in your direction and little blessings are everywhere. You just have to be willing to grab your pink li-lo and go find it. You can’t hide under the covers. You have to be out there – looking, seeing, finding and appreciating.

I make this promise to myself right now – I will not hide from life’s experiences because I think I have seen it all. I will believe that there is a man out there that is like tonight’s sunset. That I will go to sleep at night with optimism and wake up with appreciation for the beautiful things this world and this life have to offer.