Chalking it up to Ideals

My life isn't the only life that has been thrown a curve ball or two. Although, when it comes to my days on this Earth, it does seem I am getting closer to 1/2 a dozen or so hiccups, where everything was thrown up in the air, time to regroup, restart and replan the rest of my life. I won't complain, as each time this has happened things sort themselves for the better, I become stronger, more independent and more focused on what I truly want. Its definitely for the positive.

2011 started with a hiccup - a BIG one - but not one that everyone did not predict or see coming. As the year has progressed and I have moved forward, I have often looked back and wondered 'what was I thinking?!', how did I get so far down this path - almost to the point of no return - when I simply wasnt happy, and never was going to be if I continued such path?

Then the other day, it all became clear, quite unexpectedly. A friend of mine and I were driving by a crowd of people, and I saw a guy who resembled my old beaux. I commented out loud, "That guy looks like such-n-such but with darker hair...It kinda looks brown." My friend practically stopped the car, exclaiming, "IT IS SUCH-N-SUCH AND OF COURSE HE HAS BROWN HAIR!!!"

Really? I always had thought it was blonde. As I looked back at the crowd, it was definitely my old friend. I recognized the same polo-shirt from last summer, same khaki shorts and same old flip flops. Yet it was him - his being - I hardly recognized. My old beaux definitely had brown hair, not blonde. And I was the idiot of the day for not seeing it.

Such a simple realization sent my thinking mind a churning and I had to wonder outloud as we continued on our drive. Is it possible, that maybe I was just 'too in it' to ever recognize the real him, to see him as he was? That I was so focused on making the situatation work, to make it what I wanted, that I never allowed myself to see the situation for what it truly was? Maybe if I hadn't been so focused on "the ideal situation", the "happenstance of life", the "need to find purpose in the whirlwind that led me back to Cartersville", I would have seen the light... the truth... what was real, and what was not...way before this random summer day? Not because of his brown hair, but because we never saw each other for who we were as people. The 'ideal' was there, but the reality was a bitter bite. Maybe had I seen clearly prior to now, the frustrations, the angst, the unhappy memories of the previous year wouldn't exist.

But they do. And as a result, I will never know the person in the crowd with brown hair, and he will never know me as I truly am. And it is sad, but it is real.

Long before this summer day, I had asked myself (and several girlfriends) if a yoga-mat-carrying, subway-riding NYCer who voted for Obama was capable of finding happiness with a truck-driving, sub-division-living GA-boy. Somewhere in the past 18 months I had figured out the answer, but it didn't ring crystal clear until now.

Somehow the ideal of 'making it work' outdid the truth of 'different strokes for different folks'. But we... or at least I... know now. Time to wipe the fingerprints and smudgies off the 'glasses of life', focus on what is real and say 'c'e la vie' to what isn't. Learn from the mistakes of yesterday, and move further forward.

Let 'ideals' be what they are, something to hope for, something to wish for. But let life and reality be what we want, what feels good, what we would choose if our eyes and our hearts are wide open... and what we recognize as real from afar (or up close), no matter how much time passes.