A little over a month ago now I intended to write this posting. I had such a good idea at the time about the joy of first love and the impact that can have over the course of our lives.

Fortunately I devoted my energy to reading a number of books so that my quota for the year was reached. As a result each time I came back to the subject matter I found it morphing and not in any way I had hoped it would. I had a specific notion of what I wanted to say and as the topic was contemplated variables arose. So, this led to something new and that is okay too.

It started with a simply amusing dream of my first girlfriend. How could we ever forget our first right? In the dream I found a total joy with which I have not experienced in possibly two decades now. Back then, there was a completeness to my life when we were together despite underlying issues that I was blind to.

Sentimentalism is a wretched topic to share with people and it serves a mild form of torture on one’s own existence so I generally loathe it entirely. I hope you will forgive if you perceive it here because that is not the intent.

Let me put it to you this way. I have been in three major relationships in this lifetime and have been truly loved in only one. With time and clarity you come to realize what was really going on in the partnership’s we participate in. The repeated discoveries of errors and paths not chosen can have an overwhelming feeling of self loathing but you mus’nt dwell.

My dream showed me a potentiality that I must strive to create in my future encounters with women, that was the clairvoyancy I derived from it. However, you have to plug a whole lot of factors into assessing that properly, especially at this point in my own life. To be brief just imagine things like experience, children, education, psychology, calm mind, etc, etc. Combined these things have allot to do with our paradigm.

The question still unanswered for myself is how do you recoup essences of what was so amazing from the early moments of our intertwinings of romance? The reason my dream gave me such joy was because I had not been in that place in so very long. Yet, what do I mean?

Twenty two long years ago I worked hard to woo the most creative, lovely, intelligent woman I had ever met. It took a long time for love to bloom between us and that made it all the more sweeter. She held me off and frustrated the crap out of me when I tried to move us forward as a couple. The reward was beautiful for the effort looking back now and yet I had no clue that I was going to spoil it all in the coming years.

To share how we can so easily lose sight of who we are and what we are to become is impossible. But it seems to happen to allot of men. Usually with the most disastrous of consequences to those we profess to love. My first love (or so I believed) was at twenty. It was over before I reached twenty three. I played out every wrong emotion I could remember from my childhood and was then shocked when it all collapsed, dumb right?

My second shot at love was a home run, I just did not know it. The seven years we shared were the best I was ever going to have but I lost my way on the journey to thirty years old. I forgot who I was supposed to become and so I created a bumpy dirt road away from the one paved for me and bounced and flailed for thirteen long years.

I tried to find love again and was sure I had found it. So sure that I built magnificent illussions about her and what it all meant. When that relationship was forcibly ended I drove myself even farther away from who I needed to be. It has been a sad and heartbreaking walk back across that bumpy road towards the path I should have stayed upon.

The wreckage viewed and the peripheries of effect my actions have caused are haunting to say the very least. It has taken two and a half years to understand that an apology will not fix what has happened and no desire to make things right will come to fruition. I have been an insensitive idiot, a coward and most of all stupid. You cannot fix stupid, you can only examine and learn. This time here offers the seclusion necessary to ponder the life lived, to examine it with my whole heart and mind and as much as I hate to say it, this event has helped to save me from my own damaging nature.

From the place I have been to the life I want to see comes insight gleaned from careful thinking. That is why the dreams are such a nice surprise some times. It is a deeper psyche that produces the scenarios and offers me and you the ability to look at it’s meaning and see it for what it is or could become. If you attach no signifigance to the event of the dream or what took place you can dwell in a more neutral place and begin to see the signifigance, and it is all significant.

The state of dreaming can become a most pleasant and rewarding exercise if we develop equanimity within ourselves. For those terrible thirteen years I was lost I had awful dreams quite often. I became afraid of dreaming because there was always so much upset in it. The journey has lead me to here. I have brought myself to this place because I lost sight of who I was becoming. I intend to step onto to my correct path when this time inside ends. However, there is still development to be had and wisdom to gain, plus experience.

Treating people well though and giving my best each time I have an opportunity is where I am at today. Enhancing that is what tomorrow could look like, we shall see.

Ronald May
DOC #359444