Peace of Me

There are no words. 

This is because I have never bothered to bring them together in any meaningful way. The words exist, but I chose to dwell in a feeling. Not always the same feeling at that. I am no poet. I have never tried to describe the sky as it puts on a show and reminds me that it can wear colours other than blue. Other than grey.

The sky is the sky. It was here before I ever arrived on the scene, and it will be here long after I am gone. So long that it may as well be an eternity, and I have no understanding of what that means as I skate along the surface of reality. A stone flung into existence and destined to lose momentum and sink again into oblivion.

It is what it is. The sky. The world. Everything that was here before I was.

And then there is him.

He is…

Everything.

And yet…

I sought to make him nothing.

I think I know why, but only as I try to see him as he really is, and at last accept the entire panorama of his being.

Like the sky, the sun and the moon, he was there before I came into this world and he will be there when my time ends. That is the way of it. He is my North Star. He is my world. He is everything that went before me. A constant that I cannot ignore. I would cease to be if that were possible.

But I did try to claim ignorance over the reality of him.

Our contrary nature leads us to folly upon folly. We dance around in absurd circles. We pull up a chair, sit on the beach and order the tide of life to cease its inexorable march. The tune we dance to is not even our own. I don’t think we ever dance to our own tune. Or if we did, our dance would be obscene and destructive. The song is not ours. Never ours. It is shared with those we love. We come together in love and the song is an expression of our communion. We find our band and we jam for the sake of our very lives. We only ever make sense in a loving embrace. Everything else is just the motions of practicality. Washing our hands of the dirt of a harsh and unforgiving world. Cleansing ourselves of myriad sins.

We are all sinners. Plodding through life burdened by our dark thoughts and selfish deeds. There is pain in living, and an effort of will to raise our heads and look those we love in the eye. We are not worthy. That is the way of things. Our worth resides within those around us. The love we give, not that which we receive. We must create our worth from the most difficult of beginnings. From nothing. We are worthless and yet expected be become something valuable. That is the price that life demands of us.

To be in receipt of love is a hardship. It places upon us a deep obligation that we will struggle for the rest of our lives to fulfil. It is that obligation that is responsible for the momentum of our lives. We owe a debt that we can only ever pay forwards. We cannot hand love back. We have to give it away, but never cheaply. We must find recipients worthy of our love. The potential for love via a connection that we can never lose, even after that special person is gone and there is no further opportunity for physical immediacy. They live on in us for ever more.

We may not choose carefully. In which case we need luck and can only make that luck with the hard graft of truly living. Our initial connections are not even a choice. But we may choose to vandalise them in petty vengeance for imagined hurts.

Everyone will hurt us. We are imperfect, as are they. To hold them to an impossible standard makes real our fetid imaginings, and we defile the sanctity of love, stealing meaning from the world in favour of sacrilegious blame, and that blame will always lead to the acid lakes of hate.

As a young man, I gave myself over to blame and in so doing I was as far from being a man as was possible. I was indulged in this, but blinded by my ignorance, I resented the presence of this man.

Growing up took me longer than I could ever have imagined. I reached false summit after false summit, only to discover that I was climbing the wrong mountains. Nevertheless, I carried on until I realised that it was never about coming out on top.

Looking up is a good start.

We’re born looking up, but somehow we forget how important this is. To grow up, you have to point yourself upwards. We look up to those that we love, but we fear being looked down upon. Those who look down upon others are lost and going in the wrong direction. Merely a distraction to be endured and ignored. Those who love you are looking up too. We follow each other’s example and in so doing we find something better than any of us. That’s when we truly grow.

He is my hero.

That takes a lot of saying. It hurts me to say it, but it hurts all the more that I went far too long without saying it. 

He isn’t just a hero. He is mine. Peculiar to me. Always there for me. Whether I liked it or not. That I made such choices as like and dislike, shames me even now. My clumsy and idiotic forays into life were doomed to failure as I denied this man, and what he meant to me, and for me.

So much in life does not make sense. We tell ourselves that no one told us what life was about. They did. We did not listen. Besides, it’s obvious. Anything else is an awful noise. The noise of chaos. A noise that will drown out the song of life. 

If we let it.

If we make poor choices. Choices lacking in the value of love and truth.

The song is an ordering of notes. It is harmony. We need order so that we can do more than merely survive the chaos. We make things make sense. We order the notes so that they sit where they have always belonged.

He is my Dad and I was born into a world where he sang to me and made sense of my world. He protected me, making a safe and loving space for me to find me, find the way and be. He nurtured me. Showing me the path and encouraging me along it. He led by example. He lived and breathed what it was that I should do.

Only now do I sing the song of my unsung hero.

Only now do I understand what it is that I must do.

I wilfully underestimated this man. I disrespected him and attempted to devalue his love for me. Now I accept and own it and I carry it forward into the world. It is for me to gift his love to those who will need it for the rest of their lives, and in giving I will be made whole. I will be who I was always destined to be, and I will be the person who he saw from the very moment he held me aloft and cried tears of joy at my coming into the world. 

His world.

Our world.

He is a part of me. He formed my foundations and gave me a place to build upon. Handed me the strength and wherewithal to keep building. Without him, I would be nothing. Unable to launch myself into the world. Badly behaved. Disconnected. Angry and hateful.

His love lights the way.

I feel its warmth now. I really do. I see so much more of it, and I see it for what it is at last. I had to walk through my fear and obstacles of my own invention to get to the place that was always meant for me.

My only regret is that I was so late to this party.

At his funeral I made of myself an island, and from this lonely place I sniped at his memory. I besmirched the man I loved in revenge for his leaving me. My goodbye was a passive aggressive lament. A self-piteous rant. I resented his exit and the looming perfection he threatened to invade my heart with. I could not live up to his example in life. In death he won a crushing victory over me.

And death loomed large now that he was gone.

He was no longer my protector, and I was alone as I stood toe to toe with the ultimate conclusion of all my endeavours. 

My father’s death hurt me far more than I could admit to myself. My inner child raised its arms and simply and plaintively sighed one word.

Daddy.

The loss I experienced was partially of my own making and that part hurt the most. I could not console myself with my having told that craggy and powerfully built man that I loved him. Those words were not enough. Or rather the meaning I attributed to them was dull and lacklustre. I was small in my feelings for him. I pulled my punches. I did not try. I did not live my love. My intent was half-hearted and cowardly, when I owed him so much more than that. 

He believed in me when I lacked any belief in anything that mattered.

In the dark well of my grief, I curled up in self-pity and stared longingly into the darkness of despair. I had a sense of a fall that would never end, even as I prayed for an end. I lost my grip and there was no meaning.

Those were dark days indeed. But there is always a light, and that light dwelt within me. When I was done with licking my wounds I responded to the warmth I felt within and as I looked up and out of my pain, I saw his face and much, much more. 

I reached out to him and in reaching out I knew he had always been there for me and always would be. That the perfection I had mistakenly loathed was simply a father’s love. All I had to do was truly accept that love and start living again. 

I did it for him and in giving myself freely, I did it for me and I did it for everyone else in my life. I opened up and became more of myself. In the aftermath of my awakening, I laughed at my fear and ignorance. I had tried to display a strength that I did not possess by closing myself off. I denied my true nature by abhorring my vulnerability. 

We are capable of greatness and that greatness comes from our vulnerability. We are born helpless and we will die helpless, but in between, we must strive. We must bend our backs and shoulder the struggle of life and push forth come what may. Life is movement. By putting one foot in front of the other we not only walk the path, we also forge the way for those we love.

He was my hero and now I sing his song, and I sing it loud. I sing until my lungs are fit to burst and I am filled with the joy of life. And there is peace in this. A blissful place where I love and I am loved.

He was more than that song though.

He was my Dad, and he showed me the way.

He showed me love and more importantly how to show and share that love. He was the first of my relationships, and he is in all the relationships I have had ever since. He is forever with me and I am glad. 

Thank you Dad. I will live the rest of my days in gratitude and be the man you always saw in me. The man you yourself wanted to be, but sacrificed and gave so that I had every opportunity of being. I share your vision now, and I live it for my own son. You’d love him to bits, he’s so like you, only funnier. He’ll laugh in the face of adversity and enjoy the life ahead of him. I am certain of it. After all, you did.