Melancholy

I've slowly been learning to come to grips with a cold, hard, beautiful fact of my life: I am a melancholy person and I currently am experiencing this truth. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy life and I believe I laugh quickly and with gusto and enjoy seeing others do the same. But it doesn't take very long for me to get to a place where I feel more deeply and feel like my guts are sloshing around in the basement of a sad house.

Life is beautiful, so incredibly beautiful. I watch my kids and I listen to them tell stories and say ridiculous things ("God is so powerful that he can carry giant lawn chairs." What?!?). I am able to sit on a lake and fish and watch my world. I enjoy relax in the evening with my wife and we figure out exactly how to save the world. Typically this occurs right around 11:00 at night. We call it 11 o'clock genius.

But life is incredibly tragic and seems to be more so for some than others. I could list off a small book of people I know who are fighting cancer at this very moment. These people all have family and loved ones who are hoping and praying that everything goes very well but who all know the possibilities on the other side of the coin. I just read an article on CNN about police finding a women who spent the last 17 years living in a shed. She was abducted by a couple when she was eleven years old and was concealed in a shed while having two children who were fathered by her captor. The kids are now 15 and 11 and were raised in a shed. "They are all in good health," Kollar said in response to a question about how Dugard and her children are doing. "But living in a backyard for the last 18 years does take its toll." Go figure.

These are just a few of the things that reinforce my melancholy self. Life is beautiful, but life is also incredibly brief (even if you live for your 80 years) and unpredictable. I wear that sentiment on my leg partly because I enjoy brilliant, inspirational art and partly to remind myself on a lazy Sunday afternoon to take my kids to the park and be ridiculous even when I would love to just be lazy. The blossoms are falling from the tree and we never really know when they're done.

So, I'm going to go to a party to celebrate my niece's upcoming wedding tonight. We're going to laugh, enjoy each others company, have good food and drink and hope for a wonderful future for them. Sometimes hope can be a rare commodity but I'll do my best to revel in it and stoke it's flame so we can all keep warm.