thinking about thinking, feeling what you're feeling

Coasting along, everything is okay, or liveable, feeling comfortable even with your discomfort. Indefinitely, you think, this could just go on. And then the rug is pulled out from under you... and it's scary as all hell, because it's a flying carpet, until you realize you're floating, and for the first time in a long time, you actually feel free to feel what you feel, and you're thinking about what you've been thinking about. And you realize how insane you were to let yourself be okay with the things you became okay with. And you were pushed into the oblivion by a hand out of the dark but you should have been jumping eagerly into the wonderful unknown.

And your thoughts and feelings bleed into one another, they contradict each other for the sheer volume of them. It's only because you allowed yourself, no, forced yourself to think yourself into that little prison, with sunlight painted on the walls and free pizza for lunch every friday, and you tricked yourself into thinking that it was not a prison. You were filled with those thoughts that betrayed who you really were... who are you again? On the faces of your friends, in the words of that distant friend, in your voice when you sing along to every song and that brings you joy, finally you are you again.

And now you have to start again but it's not from nothing... not at all. Even though nobody believes that you learned the greatest lessons of your life so far while living in poverty on the wages of a coffee shop, you know that it's so. It's not that you know how to make a perfect latte, or cleaned bathrooms 6 or 7 times a week. It's that you loved those people, it's that you all worked together and became friends and "had each other's backs". The hours spent over nachos and beer, not letting anything change who you were. And they wouldn't have asked you to change just as you never asked anyone to change. Just being free to grow and mature and providing a safe environment for each other to do the same. What were those lessons? Don't forget. Don't forget that abundance is in your heart and your mind, and if it isn't there it doesn't matter how much you make an hour. Life happens thought by thought, and you can make everything better one thought preceeding one word, preceeding one action. Cappuccinos are expensive but love is free. That people can be really stupid but they can be really wonderful too, and love is the catalyst.

And now you are starting over, but it's definitely not from scratch. And you won't go back. It's an opportunity to start making those old dreams come true... To learn to fly and to write that movie and learn to play the guitar and sing and to find the job at the place that wants what you have to offer and won't ask you to stop coming up with solutions to problems they've come to terms with years ago. To go back to school and be able to finally really say the sky's the limit. And to be okay with the fact that sometimes you use trite cliches in your writing... atleast you don't mix metaphors.