Tired Eyes.

Heavy heavy shit lately. Strange when life seems a bit more like life should when you least expect it. When you're forced to slow down & take a look at the negative for a minute. I think that's the way it should be. As terrible as death and disease and change and anger and all of those other awful things are, it reminds me of so many other things. With the negative comes a lesson for the positive. With the bad comes the good, the up with the down, it's a constant yin & yang situation. Not because it's fair but because its the balance of life. We need to see the awful disgusting disparraging things in life to remind us how good so many other things are, to be grateful for lives lived & people we know & the way we do things. I've been thinking a lot about all of this lately, the past week almost. I've had friends with friends passing, a friend of mine, although not as close as some, still someone i highly respected and honestly loved to be around, & saw on a pretty regular basis, just go crazy. And i don't mean, did-something-stupid-so-i'm-going-to-call-him-crazy kind of crazy, i just mean honest to goodness, now he's in a mental ward crazy. And then on a bigger scale you have places like Haiti, and Chile, i mean all of these terrible upsetting things happening all over the world, but just recently having a horrible situation going on in my own life really just makes everything else feel so much closer to home.
They have a website right now, with a Person Finder, for victims of the earthquake in Chile. There are currently 31700 people being tracked. How would it be to have your entire life flipped upside down, and in this case taht phrasing is really pretty literal. Mothers looking for children, children looking for mothers, entire families completely destroyed. How do you deal with such a huge life changing event? How do you deal with a not as huge life changing event? You don't realize how much one person can affect you once they're gone, or once they're no longer available, or maybe just not even speaking to you anymore, whether for the bad or for the good. And when they're gone, they're gone and sometimes it's hard to even look back and remember. I do this all the time, with friends, with family members, not even with people, just the basic feeling of loss. And as much as you can look outside & see that everything's still beautiful, the world is still going on, your favorite songs are still the same, but there's a hole, there's something missing. And the more loss you deal with, the more sadness you feel and the more tragedy you deal with, the more the "something missing" really isn't something missing at all. It may be a sad part of you, it may be something you don't want to think about all the time, or dwell on, but it's a part of you all the same. It's still something that makes you stronger, that shows what you've gone through, what you're capable of dealing with, how you can still move forward and progress through so much anger or sadness or pessimism or whatever it is. You take it on as a part of you and that person or that thing that's gone or changed, will always be there. Because that tragic or sad or whatever situation that they went through, has affected someone else, and imprinted their memory onto you. Forever, i mean that shit doesn't go away, it's part of the story of your life that shapes you as a person. And they're never gone. So even though, when i hang out at my friend's house, and that person, if he never comes back and we always have that hole where he'll be missing, at least we'll have the hole. At least we'll have the good memory of how it used to be and how much fun we've all had, and the friends to remember him by and the people around who can think back and smile about what a great person he was. And if that's all you have left, well that's a pretty great thing to have. You can still get happiness from that person and the way they used to view the world, even if that's not how they view it anymore.
So i guess while it's good and humbling and necessary to look at the negative and let it sink in, it's only so you can sift through all the mud to find water. To find the positive in your negative. At least that's the way i'm going to look through this. That's the only way you can, this person whoever you've clearly loved or cared about enough to let yourself break down & feel real emotion over, they wouldn't want everyone to bum out on their loss, or who or what they've become, or how their house is destroyed or they no longer have a family, no one wants sympathy in the long run. It doesn't help, it hinders you really. To have someone just tell you how awful everything is and go over the details and wonder why with you, it will only bring you down more. And while i love being sad just as much as the next person (well maybe not, i don't know if other people enjoy being sad, i do though, it reminds me that with the lower the lows you get even higher highs & just reminds you that life is still life despite boring routine or feeling stuck, it's going to throw you something you were never ready for in the next round) it's never beneficial when extensive. You memorialize that person in the way you handle the tragedy, you move forward in their memory. You move forward for the memory of every person who has ever affected you and has been lost, you move forward for life, you move forward for the people who are going to affect you, who you are going to affect yourself, you move forward for the people who are going to see how you react and have it change them, and change their perspective. You just never know what chain reaction you're going to cause. You never know what the next turn is going to be, or what other event could possibly happen. I mean we're walking blindly down a mountain when you look at it, you can go slow and feel out around you and try to make you're way to your goal, but life involves risk, whether it be on a large or small scale, so when you stop crawling and grabbing around for where to go next, you have to start walking, and sometimes you don't end up at your goal, sometimes you just fall off. And you can't control it, when it comes to the big picture. All you can do is control how you deal with it. That's how i avoid they "how could this happen frame of mind." you just have to see how ELSE this situation can affect you. How can i help those even more affected than me? Without the sympathy, without the empathy. WIth logic, and with understanding, and truth and love and life.