What began as a business trip to Denver, Colorado to visit with the donor of the institute where I work and then attend a conference in Boulder, became a series of revelations (dare I say almost a peak experience? – with apologies to Maslow and to the Rockies). I really had not seen this coming. In retrospect, I had been too distracted. Way too distracted by utter nonsense. For months I had been on the cusp of many thoughts all coalescing in an adjusted life posture about a whole host of life issues affecting me. I was no longer just 50, I am now in my 50’s, and it is forcing me to reevaluate my remaining time on Earth whether I like it or not. I have always done this, but not lately…I have always been pretty good at being aware of the brevity of life and making the most of my time with a wide range of experiences and travels.

The events of this 10 day period were so instructional. I am still deeply grateful and almost overwhelmed. Certainly, at least, I am whelmed on a daily basis. This trip reverberates in me a week later and I will bet it will for quite a while. Much more than most trips. The working part was there: donor visit was fine and as expected. The conference was (unfortunately) as expected, though I had held out a glimmer of hope – dashed. There were many positives at the conference in a series of very high level meetings. But there were many deep disappointments from quarters that should simply not be. I only mention these work days in passing as they frame up the contentment revelations that bookended the trip to Colorado and underscored the very essences of the shifts in my heart. I do not intend to write about work in this diary except when necessary.

Cristine and I had the chance to spend the prior and following weekend in Colorado with dear friends who live minutes from the Rockies. They are 40 year friends of my wife and 18 year friends of mine (the time I have known Cristine). I could feel my shoulders release and laughter return to my breath. Oh my.  The room was filled with caring and support and it almost felt foreign. Though I had to work a lot on that first weekend to prepare for my meetings, it actually felt calm and positive. So unlike how I had been feeling for so long. We laughed, drank wine and cooked and played cards and slept outside in the cool mountain air.

Midweek between business meetings, I scooted away and came back to UNC Greeley to lay out on the lawn and picnic under the stars while the Colorado Symphony played Aaron Copeland. It was a smackdown to my heart; again underscoring an almost toxic lack of bliss that had overtaken me during the past year. I was letting myself become a hostage to cruelty and unkindness and, most unsettling and hurtful, I had allowed it to fester because I was more concerned about others than I was about myself. Normally the energy expended in such life matters interacting with others would be refilled and reclaimed. Balance. Flow. But not this time. Not this time. This feeling was new and it was void of common decency – and if allowed to continue, it very literally might become something which could have long term real damage to my spirit and body. This revelation was not something new to me or secret from myself. I knew this could possibly become true. I had hoped against hope – but in this moment on the lawn, I finally accepted that not everything I had wished to have happen would. Much was going to have to change. For the better. And I was going to have to change it- and myself.

The weekend after the conference in Boulder, we left for Rocky Mountain National Park and Estes, Colorado. The time we spent up in the mountains bore into my soul as always happens when we are in our National Parks. The petty becomes bluntly obvious and not only does the petty reveal itself as stupid but also as perilous. The glacial and tectonic clock on display all around us made the sense of time cosmological and beyond awe, akin to the first time as a child when you truly attempt to contemplate the vastness of the night sky and star fields. Teaching moments, re-teaching moments, recharging, rejuvenating and redolent with perspective. Those mountains those rock flows those living things in that altitude and environment. Sublime and terrifying and possible.

Back at our friends’ house for the last day before we had to say good bye, playing cards and sleeping again outside in the cool mountain air, I knew that something had changed inside me. Far to the better. I knew it wasn’t going to suddenly be all right all at once. Hardly. But I also knew that I had allowed my sense of decency and care be sublimated by forces unworthy. And that, again, it was time to go back into life and take my whole being and have faith that my perspective has value and keeping my contentment and bliss as critical path was no longer negotiable. On any terms. And that it was time, finally, to say enough. And I also realized that those who love me had been very hurt that I would allow myself to slip like this. I had disappointed not only myself. It was time to move on.

And this was not simply a message to myself about work, but more fundamentally, it was a rally cry for me to pursue more joy and not think that this pursuit is in any way secondary to my time here on Earth. In fact it has primacy. I had known that once. I had lived that once. I am determined to live it again. There really is a Rocky Mountain high. I was suddenly 18 again and in the Himalayas.

But that is another story.

I am feeling very old and worn. Nice opening sentence, huh? I think that the nonsense factor of much of human activity is self inflicted ego driven distraction. Everyone is guilty. But not everyone is aware or willing to be open to the real conversation. I am finding more and more that I don’t have any place in my heart or spirit for more diatribes – no matter how freeing that they may seem to be during the act of it. Instead, I want to return to the purpose for which I originally named this blog. Contentment. And that content, especially the diatribe variety, and actual contentment, are not necessarily the same thing. At all.

Instead, I will try to use this space mostly just for me; to keep an ongoing diary reminder of those moments that have or continue to bring contentment to me and keep me focused on aspirations for more of that sense of well being, purpose and moment.

I know I know very little. In that regard I am equal to all beings. And they are all equal to me. Epistemology 101. In my personal discovery of the minutiae of the moments of my contentment perhaps there can be found a better common ground for me to engage. What little I do know has come from such a broad and varied past. I am not certain that I have a single regret. Or perhaps I have simply forgiven or forgotten and in those cases why would anyone regret something trivial enough that can be so easily dismissed? I will write of my experiences albeit with the advantage of distance and creakiness of memory. I will do my best; but in this regard they are wisps of memory smoke and I am generally much less forgiving of myself than I am of others. But I know as I write this, that these writings will most likely be of little interest to anyone else. And that is why this is my personal corner of cyberspace.

I feel time pressing in and accelerating my hurtling toward inevitable death and this is reasserting my questions of cosmology and our place in all the energy and mass. It is not a dark thought, merely sobering. I find it increasing the value of my remaining time and increasing my distaste for the waste of moment and effort (time and action). An advantage of growing older I suppose but I also feel like I am picking up from a place I set down many years ago; not all at once, but gradually.

I am not alone at all in this. Many are awake to this feeling I believe, though still I fear we are an incredible minority. At least that’s what I perceive. And ultimately I feel that these are the drivers for our troubles as a species, a shocking lack of imagination and, as importantly, a frightening lack of quiet and quietude to reflect on the personal truths of the boring everyday life we all actually live. So much easier to be entertained (distracted) by the false values and insipid values of market.

So somehow, and grandly imperfectly, I will try to be a diarist. No Pepys I. So don’t get your hopes up. Mostly I will write for the exercise so that I might have another tool to reason out my fear and sadness for this existence and disappointments in people and rather return those feelings and experiences to the subordinated place they actually belong, behind the awe filling moments of life and contentment that are far too easily unseen and unappreciated. For another thing I think I know is that these moments and reflections are about the only things worth attending to; and all effort is best spent on attaining this for ourselves and through our work, for others.

I am ultimately comforted by the fact that no one will find me on this desolate cul-de-sac of cyberspace and therefore I can pretty much have the place to myself to muse and fail. If however there is another being out there and you come to this place and feel the need to speak, please be gentle and remember that behind the binary code that here divides us in real- and cyber-space, there yet remains a living soul on both ends of the keyboard. Living, at least, for the moment.