Sleepless Thoughts

I lost a good friend recently.  He lived a relatively long and good, but somewhat solitary life by choice.  He lived a life on his terms....not the terms that most people would willingly choose.  I did not know him until roughly 10 years ago and there is much about him that I do not and never will know.  But I suspect that, because of his chosen solitary lifestyle, I am one of the few that know the most about him.  I owe it to him and to myself to remember as much about him as I can and to remember what a good and selfless man he was.

I think about the paths that led us to one another....paths so indescribably different that it is hard to understand how we could have possibly ended up in the same place and shared existence for what has turned out to be a brief period of time.  My journey to him was filled with choices that I have made, that have been made for me, perhaps by fate or karma, and certainly not predetermined.  I think about some of the decisions I have made in my life that were bad decisions, and there have been many.  If I had it to do over, I would have not made some of the decisions I have made....decisions that have hurt me and those that I love. 

But then I think what would have been the outcomes of those decisions?

Every decision that I have made has led me to this point in time at this place in this existence.  And every decision that I made up to that time led me to that classroom in the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Ann Arbor in the Fall of 2004 where I met my friend for the first time.  And that is only half of the equation.  He was 15 years older than me and also has made a lifetime full of decisions, both small and large, that led him to me.  For example, one of his large decisions as a young man in New York City was to attend Northern Michigan University....a place so far away from Manhattan in place and culture so as to be almost like going to another planet.  That was a decision he made that he could never fully explain, but I am so glad he made it.

I suspect any one decision made differently by him or by me made during two lifetimes' full of decisions would have deprived us of the opportunity to become friends and brothers.  Right here, at this moment I am grateful for every decision that he and I have made, good or bad, that led us to one another.

The web of our lives that we weave, consciously and unconsciously....something to ponder as I have, while lying awake at night

One Grateful Runner - 4 miles

Yes...another blog about running.  Yes...another blog by someone who thinks he has something to say that someone else might actually be interested in what he has to say.  Why, you may ask?

I'll be honest....this blog isn't for you.  It's for me.  This is a public act of self indulgence.

I do my best thinking when I'm running.  There's a clarity that comes to my thinking when I'm on a good run, usually coming into focus after that first mile.  I sometimes feel that if I could just run through all my waking moments I could make sense of a lot of stuff that confuses the heck out of me.  There's a lot of stuff to process in life and not just enough running time to process it all.

So I'll spend some time sharing my thoughts after my runs.  You'll see how far I've run by the mileage in each of my post titles.  I have no idea where this is going to go.  Buckle up!