The Experiment – A 365 Day Search For Happiness

First of all I want to thank all of you who wrote me kind, supportive notes here, on Facebook, in emails and in texts after my blog post yesterday. I was really in rough shape after Monday night’s fiasco, uncertain if I could ever come through it and venture out again. Today I know that it may take time but that it will happen. When, where, and how I haven’t a clue but I learned a lot and I will not put myself in a position where the things that happened Monday evening will happen again. We live and learn.

Then, yesterday, after I uploaded the post and was going through email a message popped up in an ad on the side. It said, “Life finds a way.” I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, for me, but I knew that I was supposed to see that message. I was still afraid but it gave me hope. My dear mentor, muse, and friend, May Sarton, used to write a phrase in her journals from time to time quoting her friend, the poet Louise Bogan. She said that Louise would say, “Let life do it.” Life will surely “do it.” It will sweep through our lives and make change whether we are ready or not. But the thing that I know is that life cannot create optimum change unless we are willing participants, we have to do our part. As one dear friend wrote to me on Facebook, I can shrink back from the world or I can go out into it, either way it is my choice. I choose life.

I am not sure how I will proceed. Today I am on my way out to therapy and I have errands afterwards. I have to stop at the little pet store to get food for Vincent, the Beta fish. I have to stop by a little pharmacy and get Pugsley’s medication for the month, and I have to go to Costco to do food shopping. It feels like a lot to me just now but I can make myself do what I have to do. As hard as it is for me to leave the house these are the kinds of things I can do. It is the extra things, the things like stopping last week for a glass of wine at the charming little neighborhood bar, or going out to dinner, these are things I don’t have to do, and it has been easier for me not to do what I don’t have to do when it is hard to go out at all. And stopping for a glass of wine now carries a risk it didn’t before. Though I was perfectly fine Monday night when the policeman stopped me, which he completely agreed with as he sent me off without a ticket and said there was no problem, the very thought that I could be stopped in such a random way, barely out of the parking lot, not driving down the road or speeding or swerving or anything that might indicate a drunk driver was at the wheel, my little mishap in driving over a little concrete bump in the road made him think there might be a problem. Any of us can have such a mishap which has nothing to do with being a drunk driver, but what if you have had a glass or two of wine with dinner? Where do they draw the line? Not inebriated but having a little wine with a nice meal. How do they measure that? It is the uncertainty that frightens me. How does one know about these things? Since I rarely leave the house and don’t drink much at all I am uneducated about this.

It is now late in the afternoon. I made it out to therapy, I did all of my errands, I got home, got the groceries in and the dogs out, fed them their dinner, put the groceries away, did some watering in the garden, and sat down here to take a look at the blog post I had written. I had finished it, or so I thought, just before leaving for therapy bu I didn’t have time to read through and edit it. I’m glad I didn’t post it. I have just cut half of it out. There was too much about hurt feelings and feeling disappointed by other people and that’s just not something I’m going to write about here. What happened Monday night happened, I learned what I needed to learn, I have moved on. That whole night is now a part of my past. I don’t intend to hold onto bad feelings and I’m not one to hold onto grudges. Some things can be hard to let go of, but the act of letting go is a kind of spiritual cleansing. When you hold onto disappointments and hurts the dark feelings get all over everything. Let go, let go, let go.

Therapy went very well today. Helene helped me make sense of all of it, helped me understand the whole police incident explaining to me that if I had one or two glasses of wine with a nice meal even if I was pulled over for some reason I wasn’t going to get hauled off for a DUI! I had no clue. I didn’t understand any of that. And I would be having a little wine out so seldom it is not likely to ever be an issue. I wasn’t pulled over because of suspected drunk driving, I was just pulling out of the parking lot. It was a traffic snafu but I voluntarily admitted to having wine with dinner so he had to do his thing. I wouldn’t have lied, it’s just not something I do, and I was in perfectly fine shape as his tests proved. Why is being stopped by the police so scary when we know we have done nothing wrong? It just is. Countless people have told me that in the last couple of days.

In the end I can’t see the whole world as a scary place because of what happened Monday night. It will still take awhile for me to gain the confidence to have another outing somewhere but it will happen, in time. I am not going to push it, nor will I avoid it. Things will just unfold naturally in time. Life will find a way, it always does. I trust that it will.