It was a gorgeous start to the day and where else would you expect to find me but down lakeside. I couldn’t resist.
The way my schedule has evolved is that there is a chunk of time between having taken care of all the cats first thing in the morning and the eight o’clock moment where my energies need to begin to switch in favor of work.
It is a time of indulgence and it normally lasts a couple of hours or so, with all the early chores completed around 5:30 or 5:45. And with the lake only a 15 or 20 minute drive away, It has become a natural spot to enjoy my first coffee of the day.
I never travel without camera, so it also becomes my first opportunity to shoot something, hence these wildly repetitive scenes. Sorry.
Most of the differences from one shoot to the next come from whatever the sky is up to … not me.
But I put myself into a couple of the shots, enjoying my coffee and staring off at the warming horizon.
I’ve attached a few at the end of this blog and I hope you enjoy!
Man (me included) is a social animal, but some of my most enjoyable moments occur when I am alone. I don’t fear being alone and I rarely equate any such moment with loneliness.
Truth is, sometimes we are loneliest when in the company of others. So the presence of company isn’t any sort of guarantee against it.
Since I destroyed my marriage a number of years back, I have had numerous people urge me to find someone and worried about me ending up “dying alone”.
But dying alone is what happens to almost all of us anyway. Dying is a very personal experience. And however that experience feels for you, you take it with you. There is no real sharing of that experience.
Knowing you are loved or once were loved … now that is a different thing and I acknowledge that. But a present love, right at the point of your death, has no real relevance beyond perhaps adding a worry as to how your loved ones are going to feel when you are gone.
There is a horribly misguided dream that some people sell in that regards … the notion of finding a partner, falling in love, growing old together, and then dying in their arms.
For at least half the people who grow old together, that is simply a fairytale as only the first to go experiences the company at death. The longer living partner gets to die on their own, accompanied only by the memory of their lost love.
My mom spent the last few years of her life living mostly alone after a marriage of 60 odd years. So how did that dream play out for her?
I strongly suspect it was the memories of my dad that she took with her at death and of their wonderful life together.
The fact that it was a past love was irrelevant. I only use the word “past” to describe that he was no longer present. Because in truth, she never stopped loving him.
Nor will I. Either of them.
So the wonderful thing about the effects of love is that it can leave an indelible mark on your soul. One that stays with you until the end of your own days, if you let it.
As I stood there on the end of the pier, coffee in hand, that is what I was thinking of. The loves of my life. The ones that are no longer with me, except in velvet corners of my heart
And so that is really the thought I am trying to convey in this morning’s blog.
The greatest love in our life exists not in what someone is giving us, but in what we are retaining within our heart. It may be present. It may be past. It may have been sustained. It may have been fleeting.
It doesn’t matter how it was given. It matters how we encase it with our memories attached and can draw from it when we need it most.
You might find yourself standing on the edge of a pier feeling aggrieved at what life is doing to you at this moment. You might be feeling sad, depressed, or simply melancholy.
But when you are able to look beyond the horizon and into your own heart and recover the memories of love, then you are no longer alone. They are with you at the end of the pier.
They never left you. They were always there. Just waiting for you to recall them.
… just a thought.
