Today is the first day of the rest of my life

So I’ve had a few half-started posts sit­ting here that I just never fin­ished. They’re gone now, hav­ing lit­tle moti­va­tion to talk about Opera ver­sus Fire­fox 1.5 or GTK+ (who wants to hear about that?). This exposes rather well my prob­lem with this whole blog thang. I set out with this hop­ing it would be a nice com­men­tary on my life – more than per­sonal blather that, in my opin­ion, belongs in a per­sonal jour­nal, but moreso what I’m think­ing about, a pub­lic sound­ing board for my reflec­tions and insights on tech­nol­ogy, pro­gram­ming, and music. Of course it would be per­sonal, because it’s mine, but about things that would inter­est and ben­e­fit the Inter­net com­mu­nity, or “blo­gos­phere” if you will. (I hate that word almost as much as “blog”.)

But I’m no good at jour­nal­ing. My past attempts have fiz­zled. I thought this would fare bet­ter than a jour­nal because it would be online. How­ever, the oppo­site has been true. I’ve sim­ply let it go, not in the least because my life has been a bit too per­sonal lately, so I have lit­tle energy left for writ­ing on here.

My solu­tion? A longish post about my life at present.

As you can see from my last post, I now have a son. Even though I’m not rais­ing him, it’s amaz­ing to me how much that sim­ple fact changes things for me. In large and small ways, things shift focus and empha­sis in my life. Mostly, it makes me real­ize that there are plenty of things in my life in which I put too much value. It’s been my life­long goal to be a hus­band and father, but at the moment, I see that I’m not order­ing my life as such, nor have I in the past few years. I’ve been far too self­ish with my time and rela­tion­ships. The con­se­quences have been severe: I brought a boy into the world in the midst of a rela­tion­ship that was not ready for him, said rela­tion­ship has since crum­pled under the pres­sure, and I’m left unable to han­dle deal­ing with mov­ing on or get­ting over that.

I find it nec­es­sary, espe­cially after post­ing pic­tures before, to post some pic­tures of Samuel Stu­art Steven, the beau­ti­ful boy that he is. Here are two that are par­tic­u­larly dear to me. He looks so very much like Pearl and me!

I’ve been read­ing a great book about depres­sion called Learned Opti­mism by Mar­tin Selig­man. It’s about the con­cept of learned help­less­ness and explana­tory style. It’s all about how you respond to adver­sity in life. There are three lev­els on which to eval­u­ate things: whether the event is per­sonal, whether it is per­ma­nent, and whether it is per­va­sive. He says that pes­simism tends towards those three, and opti­mism tends away from them. It’s amaz­ing what a lit­tle aware­ness will do, and I’ve been catch­ing myself explain­ing things very pes­simisti­cally, from some­thing as small as burn­ing some food that I’m cook­ing (“Blast! I am such a loser! I always do that!”) to some­thing as large as my rela­tion­ship with Pearl (“I’m worth­less and my love life is doomed”). Of course, total opti­mism wouldn’t do in the lat­ter case, because what hap­pened is not Pearl’s fault per se (I don’t even like to think of it in terms of anyone’s fault or blame), it’s not imme­di­ately tem­po­rary (I’m not ready to love again), and it’s not com­pletely spe­cific (e.g. what hap­pened with our rela­tion­ship is directly related to my spir­i­tual strug­gles of late). Think­ing opti­misti­cally would be short-sighted and imma­ture. So while I can’t be com­pletely opti­mistic about every­thing, I’m find­ing that I’m far too pes­simistic about most things. This is the deep work I need to do, and I’m very glad I’m in coun­sel­ing to do it.

All in all, though this past year has been the tough­est of my life, I’m begin­ning to see some good changes in myself and things are look­ing up, bit by bit. I’m not sure if all of these things will make sense in a gen­eral way, but there are a few things that I’ve noticed that mark sig­nif­i­cant changes in the way I operate:

1. I don’t want to spend hours on my com­puter fid­dling around with crap and tweak­ing the hell out of my sys­tem. I do still like and use Linux, but I want it to work for me and not the other way around.
2. My musi­cal tastes are chang­ing. I have found Bruck­ner to encap­su­late almost all that I’m feel­ing, in such a way that his music has con­stantly and repeat­edly been point­ing me to God. His ninth Sym­phony in par­tic­u­lar seems to hold together all the pain and grief I’ve felt and lift it up before God in release. The Ada­gio there­from has brought me to tears.
   In gen­eral, I find myself lately favor­ing the Roman­tics and the slow move­ments of music, whereas I have always before tended towards the for­mal­ized Clas­si­cal mod­els. (I think it’s that Bruck­ner holds both together so well that I’ve taken to him so much.)
3. I’ve been much more accept­ing of peo­ple and their faults, par­tic­u­larly in my fam­ily. My fam­ily is the best exam­ple of love that I have on Earth, and the best oppor­tu­nity for me to love. Accept­ing and lov­ing them has been a hard thing for me over the years, but it’s worth it.
4. I’ve been spend­ing a lot more time with my fam­ily, and I see the ben­e­fits most directly in my rela­tion­ship with my lit­tle sis­ter Kait­lyn. It’s become impor­tant to us to spend time together, and I trea­sure that.

So, all told, this is osten­si­bly my last post. There’s just too much life to be lived to worry about this blog thing. Per­haps I will pick this up again in the future, but I don’t nec­es­sar­ily see that hap­pen­ing. Time will tell.

Bis dann and Adieu,
Andrew