Ah, thanks for that, Elena. I was telling my friend Rick, after a meeting I had suggested he come out to last night— he’d had a meltdown that day, pulled his car over to the side of the road and walked away from his beautiful wife and two one-year-old boys (identical twins) for a half-hour before coming back (but didn’t drink) — about the time when I did too much cocaine and had an out-of-body experience, and my best friend brought me back from that, then up and died five days later (he had Hodgkins Disease — we were both 24 at the time).
I was telling Rick that I couldn’t come to terms with any kind of a God or Higher Power that would take someone as good as Reed, and leave someone as selfish and messed up as me here to carry on with life. Just couldn’t get my head around that, and I spent an entire lonely winter getting as messed up as I could get, trying to make some sense of it all.
What finally came to me was, I had to try to do my best to honor him by striving to be like he was (he was a good guy, a giving soul, while I was definitely not), which motivated me to clean up my act and try to be about helping others, and stop being so goddamned selfish. After many years of trying to do that, to be like Reed (the friend who’d died), I realized I would never match up to that ideal, but what I could be was the best Pete that I could be.
Some days, that seems good enough. Good days. Other days, I feel woefully inadequate to live the life I find myself in the middle of. I still have a very strong selfish streak in me. On those days, I really wish I could just retire and live a simple life. Walk away from it all. Sometimes, I just get tired of it all. That’s usually when I ask for a little help from whatever the hell this thing is that they refer to as a higher power, God, the universe, whatever — I still don’t claim to know or understand how it works, I just know that when I stop trying to do it all myself, and trust the universe, shit turns around, and I’m no longer on the verge of either giving it all up, or letting it all explode in my face. I just get up and show up. Opportunities get put in front of me, and I do my best to deal with them.
We each do that, each in our own way. We do the best with what we got, with the life we find ourselves in the middle of. On a good day, I thank the universe at the end of it for allowing me to have the opportunities I had that day to live. On crap days, I go to sleep and hope for a better day tomorrow.
