Personal Reflections

September 5, 2014

I haven’t written on this blog for some time, largely a consequence of attention I have had to direct elsewhere, having decided to move from Baton Rouge to Haddonfield, New Jersey—and from LSU to Drexel.

I had multiple reasons for moving—and only one of them being an unquestionably good one—but they all added up and I made a leap—jumped off a cliff is more like it. Sometimes we just have to take risks.  The future may not turn out to be nearly what we imagined, and we have to adjust, reimagining both another future and ourselves.

I think I’m getting close to breaking free from various family, economic, and personal dramas that have entangled me for the past three months, all of them the consequence of choices I’ve made: the decision to apply for a position at Drexel, to leave LSU, to sell my house, to undergo a bilateral knee replacement six weeks before moving, to move my severely dementiated, ninety-two-year-old mother with me, to sign a contract with a realtor who has cancer. It’s been an adventure.

Although I am old enough to know better, I am still bewildered by life, by myself, and by certain people who have become important in my life. When my wife died three years ago, I lost my anchor. I have no idea of where I’m sailing—drifting might be more like it, although at times, I feel as if I have an oar in the water.

I don’t know whether I will post this reflection on my uncertainty. Here is the vortex of the complications involved in making the personal public: Some people might like the writer, and some may even love him or her. These people might be interested in the details of the writer’s multifaceted drama. Other readers who don’t know the writer very likely don’t want to know about the messy details of his or her life—unless that mess in some way helps readers reframe their own set of problems.

I am going to try to describe my central problem, which might be close to the problem of others who have found (or may find) themselves wandering in later life unaccountably alone. This is it in the tightest nutshell I can imagine: I am economically secure (one might even say over-secure); I have a fascinating profession from which I have no impulse to retire; I have a wonderful family and boatloads of very good friends. But still, I can’t settle down inside myself. I can’t find a center. I can’t get quiet in my soul. I cannot accept that I am only me. But that’s why I write.