Today

Today was a better day. Somewhere around mid morning I found myself in that spot again, that place where I really want someone to talk to but no one is around, or at least no one I want to talk to anyway. Work is so full of well, work, and there is really only one guy I could kind of talk to and to be honest, I really don’t want to sit in our very open office and talk about the stuff I want to talk about.

When these moments come up, I almost feel like crying, like literally bawling my eyes out. I can’t really explain that and am not sure I want to attempt it, but the feeling comes nevertheless and it doesn’t go away immediately. This desire for companionship is growing, I’m afraid, and it is not something I can fill with more conversations with my wife. While we have wonderful conversations, they are not what I need right now and I know it. For me at this moment, I crave being able to talk to a buddy or someone else that I can parse deep subjects with and not just run into walls of disagreement.

I’ve been in that space before, where lines of reasoning and discourse get drowned out by utterances of sighing and the withdrawing of proper conversational etiquette. There are going to be times like those and I’m OK with that, but again, that’s not what I need right now.

For a while I thought that I needed some sort of father figure type of conversation that would validate ideas from an experienced perspective but I’m finding I don’t want that at all. I want banter, I want reasonable arguments, cross examinations and a critical eye for reason and judgment. Maybe I want God to talk back for a while, that would be cool. Or maybe that’s a bad idea, I’m not sure I’m ready for that kind of criticism, who am I kidding.

There is something special that happens when you release your thoughts and opinions and they come back at you in a thoughtful and positive way. Not everything you think about is necessarily right or true. There are some ideas and thoughts roaming around in your noggin that might be a little messed up and sometimes it takes hearing them come out in a conversation and then having them repeated to you in a sensible fashion. Then, in return, for you to offer the same perspective for someone else allows you to hear your own arguments and lines of reasoning as it relates to differing perspectives. This type of discourse is what I long for and I need it badly. Sooner or later I will discover a source for it. I just have to keep looking.

What made today a better day though was that after I experienced the need again, I decided to drive myself to a quiet spot about 10 minutes away from the office, where no other people were and just sit in silence with my thoughts and prayers. I talked to God, I talked to myself, I sat there and pondered my need and I wondered why it’s become so necessary lately. After about 30 minutes I realized that I was actually OK and I began to contemplate that maybe I just needed to write more, spend more time alone like I did today and concentrate on getting my thoughts out here so I can parse them as well as see what some others have to say from the safety of their computers. I might get some good feedback, I might not, but today was good because I realized that most of my issue right now is simply getting a lot of this stuff out of my head. Once I do that, I can think straight again…