Quality Time

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

It feels like January again.  It’s late March.  I am a winter weary non-native Minnesotan who is about ready to start planting palm trees (if I had access to any!) outside as an act of defiance against the winter cold.  Old Man Winter has become for many of us the unwelcome house guest who doesn’t seem to know how to leave.  Eventually he will be shoved out by the growing strength of the sunshine.  It has to happen eventually.

I’m sitting on the bus on my way to work.  This is the best time of day for me to write now that I am a working man again.  And yet I consider this blog my own work that I hope eventually will lead to something greater.  The focus of my thoughts today is quality time.

I will be meeting with my therapist this evening.  And I will be bringing up the less than desirable topic of the quality of his own presence.  Some time after I first began seeing him I learned that he has a sleep disorder.  I have felt some concern in the past that this affects the quality of the time I have when I see him each week.  And I have felt that concern again recently.  The quality of my own ‘life-time’ has been on my mind lately as I continue to go through the grieving process of waking up to the fact that much of my earlier life was marked by a lesser quality of life.  As I have noted in past entries I was not aware that I was not perceiving the world clearly until I discovered the amazing therapeutic benefit of EMDR.  It is, however, still difficult to quantify just how much of my improvement is solely attributable to EMDR.  I made so many positive changes in my life since last June that there are many factors at play.

It’s amazing when I think of how many years passed in which I was not experiencing the world with the clarity that I do now.  I grieve the fact that so many years passed in which I perceived the world as if looking through a smudged window.  I did not see clearly the beauty of the world around me.  And I did not clearly see my own beauty.

Yesterday evening I again caught myself noticing the clarity with which my vision  now meets the world.  The days have sufficiently lengthened such that I can enjoy the beauty of an evening with daylight still filling the world.  I find great delight in being able to see so clearly.  And then I feel immense grief that it wasn’t until I was essentially forty years old that I began to see the world in this way.  Grief is my heaviest companion.  It is no wonder that I cried so much this past Sunday.  Healing can be such a long term process.

I am also recognizing the very real possibility that I might never answer some of the many questions I have about my father.  Like the relatives of those apparently forever lost on the Malaysian Airlines plane that appears to have disappeared into the south Indian Ocean who may never know the full story of what happened to their relatives I may never have answers to some of my own questions to allow me to have that seemingly elusive ‘gift’ called closure.  Will I have closure?  Apparently not in the most healthy way I will not.  And I will have to find a way to move on with my life nonetheless.