Perhaps due to some of the very traumatic and recent upheavals in my personal life, I find myself reflecting on life, the universe, and pretty much everything in depth these days. Someone once told me that once of the curses of being blessed with a high IQ is that intelligence is often accompanied by the desire/need to reflect upon and intellectualize what others might pass by as random, meaningless, or trivial. Lord knows there’s been a whole lot of that happening for me these days…but in this case I think it’s probably a good thing.
Yesterday afternoon, as I sat in a Starbucks parking lot in Hillsboro, I watched a crew take down an old oak tree so they could put up a 7-Eleven or a Circle K or some such thing. Ah, progress…. As the crew spent about 30 minutes preparing to take down a 60’ oak tree, I was struck by the lesson inherent in this simple and depressing act. The tree was easily older than I am, and yet it took no more than half an hour to pull it down…and it took that long only because the crew was dawdling. Yes, something that took years to build took only a few minutes to destroy…sort of like, oh, I don’t know…a marriage??
I find myself taking lessons from a lot of different things these days. Perhaps it’s an indication of the current state of my personal life, but there’s a lot for me to ponder these days. I also find myself listening to country music a lot. I suppose ten-plus years living in Texas will do that to a person, but my life does feel a lot like a country song- you know, love, loss, heartache? Perhaps there might even be some redemption in there somewhere, but the jury’s still out on that one.
Yes, it’s a strange and different emotional landscape I find myself inhabiting and wandering these days. I spent years building a marriage, but not surprisingly it didn’t take nearly that long to tear it down. Unlike a tree, this marriage can be rebuilt, though the prospect of that happening successfully remains an open question. I suppose if both people still love one another and there’s a high “want to” factor, perhaps there’s still hope. In the meantime….
