“Regrets? I’ve had a few… but then again, too few to mention…”, so the song goes… All of us have been there, of course… and, we all will unavoidably return there again. It’s just human nature to err, and with the benefit of hindsight we can clearly see all the boo-boos, stumbles, and bumbles in our respective pasts. Shoulda, coulda, woulda… didn’t…
“How could I have done something like that?!,” we sometimes ask ourselves… We might even catch ourselves occasionally moaning and shaking our heads in disbelief at the memory of some events in our lives that appear so obviously foolish to us now…
The trick, they say, is to learn from those missteps and move on… Not to dwell upon our failures and fumbles, but to apply the wisdom, often embarrassingly, sometimes painfully, acquired to help us do a better job down the road. I try to do that myself; but, frankly, there are some doozies in my past that I hope none of y’all ever find out about! If some of those ever did leak out, I’d be mortified to the point I’d have to just run away and hide…
I suppose a companion thought to that should be ‘to keep things in proper perspective’… To acknowledge that we’ve made far more good calls than bad, and that on balance things have worked out reasonably tolerable. To not beat ourselves up too much over those bloopers, nor to allow negative thoughts and memories to cloud or unduly influence our judgement going forward.
By the way, let me apologize right here and now, if anything I’ve ever written appears to sound like bragging or gloating about my present circumstance… That quite simply is not the case at all! It’s just that I’m so giddy about everything, I just don’t seem able to help myself… I feel like celebrating every waking moment!!!
I’m now sitting here in a cabin (actually, a one bedroom, fully equipped, basement apartment), that I rented over the internet… WOW! Not a palace, by any means, but spacious, comfortable and well suited for the needs of this solo gypsy trekker… as the most pleasing aroma of bacon sizzling in a pan on the stove this very moment permeates the air!
In a somewhat remote area of south-central Utah above 7K feet in elevation, in a canyon carved out by the Fremont River at my back door, barely a meandering stream here now, but with ample evidence it has at other times been a raging torrent. Snow-capped mountain peaks are visible off in the distance, as are amazing views of the canyon wall on the north side of this depression in Mother Earth… A ‘roll of the dice’ that has paid off handsomely for this fortunate rider…
The early morning sun brings out all the vivid, deep reds, oranges, and browns, plus the paler hues of every other shade of earth-tone color imaginable on that ‘barren vertical wall’… Those colors contrast and highlight the various strata of countless layers of rock, volcanic ash, and sediment deposited over untold millions of years. All of that, while at the same time other random, pattern-less ‘piles’ of colored stone and sand give stark testimony to the power of wind and water to corrupt and erode anything and everything.
The surprisingly uniform ‘hoo-doos’ carved through erosion out of the canyon wall are now prominent in the early morning sun… In the gray dawn before that brilliant golden light reached them, however, they appeared as an army of ghostly silhouettes standing shoulder to shoulder, silently, barely visible in the shadows for who knows what purpose… A chorus of angels preparing to sing? A band of marauding Vandals ready to pounce upon us? Perhaps they are there simply to remind of us of the skeletons we all have in our own closets…
The scattered, sparse splotches of muted grays, greens and yellows of the vegetation in this harsh environment remind one of the struggle of life here and everywhere else… Sustained life is a constant series of trade-offs, of the juggling and balancing of innumerable factors in the attempt to survive, possibly even to flourish. Letting go of the things that don’t work well while exploring other, new features that might facilitate improvement in condition is a never-ending, perpetual demand of ongoing life…
It is so energizing and inspiring to see all of this and to attempt to fathom all there is to try and comprehend! So, here I sit trying to capture all of this with mere written words… That can’t be done, of course, but the hopelessly inadequate effort is part of the enjoyment of this experience for a novice writer like yours truly… It makes me feel so humble and grateful to just be here doing what I do… to be alive and able to be here…
Yes, I’ve had my share of missteps and flubs throughout the course of my life… However, it is the cumulative sum of all the choices I’ve made, good, bad, and ugly, plus the vagaries of happenstance and fortune too, that have led me to this place and time… I wouldn’t want it to have been any other way…