Jul

Quiet Melancholy… Life Is Complicated

I watched a movie. I saw a crow. I heard the rain. I sat back in my chair and drank in the complexity that is life.

As you may have noticed, or not, I’ve been putting off the blog for the last couple months. Just life getting in the way I suppose as other things clamor to the top of my transient priority list.

The other evening I watched a movie- currently a new release in your local video rental outlets. There was a sliver of a scene that so profoundly struck me that it has caused reflection for the past few days. The movie is set in post-apocalyptic earth, after some cataclysmic event had all but decimated the human population, and one survivor is on a mission he believes he has been sent on by God Himself. The earth is charred black wherever humans had once lived- otherwise barren. He travels alone, forages for what food he can and sits alone at night as the day fades into night. He has a music player- and each night as he settles in, he plays Al Green’s “How Can Yo u Mend a Broken Heart”. It is this scene that struck me. The majority of the human race around him is gone and he is basically alone- being able to trust no one he encounters. Each night he sits in the darkness and falls asleep by himself in whatever makeshift shelter he can find. Alone. Alone with no one. No one but a song.

The following morning I woke unusually early and sat in my office chair to check my email. The rain was peppering the window behind me as I played the song- turning to see a lone crow on a power line across from the house. The rain rolled down.. refreshing the earth, but causing a sweeping sense of melancholy to emanate through me. On this quiet morning, alone with my thoughts, for a brief moment I was that lone survivor. Looking out at a quiet planet, wondering what the day would hold and expecting little. Oddly, I actually had the presence of mind to savor that melancholy feeling- one of the most human of feelings…. letting it soak in and knowing that it would pass- but for now just sitting in the quiet of the moment.

Life has been complicated the past few months. Some of that experience good, some not very good at all, and I realize that I’m just continuing on that journey we so loosely call ‘life’. Perhaps it is the days when we feel like we are travelling through a barren wasteland on our own that make us appreciate the very fact that we aren’t alone.