Danny's Epiphany

As he reached for his latte, Danny wondered why he felt the way he did. He has not felt at ease for a long time now, but somehow the feeling was much more intense today. As far as he could tell though, today had been the same as any other. He had woken up in his flat, careful not to jostle what's-her-name. He had watched the news, gotten dressed, and drove his Ducati to his office downtown. After that, he got into the executive elevator and rode it to the floor before the last, where he flirted with the receptionist, what's-her-face, as usual, and entered his office where his latte was waiting to be drunk.

So, if nothing special or different had happened, why did he feel so down? He was a 28 year old multimillionaire! The five million dollar deal he had to finish off today was irrelevant. Five million dollars were immaterial to Danny, let alone his whole firm. How many people could call five million dollars immaterial? And yet, no sooner had the thought occurred to him, he felt miserable. Before he could delve deeper into the issue, he was interrupted by a soft timid rap at his door. It took only an instant for him to compose himself – it was a vital skill for any seasoned and successful business man like himself to have, and one that he was exceptionally good at.

"Come in," he called out, and dropped the pretense of arranging papers as soon as he saw his best friend Ronnie's head poke into the room. Ronnie works in the mail room, and Danny had met him on the very first step of his staircase to success. The many floors between Danny's CFO office and Ronnie's mail room had had no effect on their friendship.

Knowing Ronnie as well as he did, Danny directly detected something off about his friend. For although Ronnie's lips were arched in a gesture of mirth, his eyes bespoke pity and sorrow. "What's wrong with your face?" Danny shot, "You look like you just saw a cat get beaten to death with a stapler."

Confused, Ronnie replied, "I was just wondering what time you wanted to…uh…" he hesitated, bit his lip, and then continued, "Go to the cemetery."

With those last four words, it all hit him with the force of a cliché piano falling out of nowhere. Becky has been dead a full year today. Danny's wife, whom he loved with enough intensity to pass for worship, was killed a year ago. Becky had stolen Danny's heart in preschool and had never given it back. Becky was a surgeon who had found time in her busy work schedule to go on campaigns to third world countries and provide health care to those who could not afford it, and she had loved Danny in spite of how different they were. Danny never cared for anything except her and making money. She, on the other hand, was making a difference, saving lives, and keeping him happy. She was superwoman, and she was no more. A stray bullet caught her in the neck during a skirmish between rival militias in Africa. She never stood a chance. Danny scoffed at the irony of her dying at the hands of the people she was trying to aid.

What would she say if she saw what Danny had turned into? He had all this money that could be doing so much for the world, and he was using it to keep his ass warm. He was not even happy. He had been trying to distract himself for a whole year from the agony of not seeing that gorgeous woman's face, or hearing her soft voice and feeling her warm breathe against his neck as they lay in bed, talking late into the night. He busied himself with work and one night stands so as not have any free time to torture himself with thoughts such as he was having now.

Danny began to lose his composure, and he felt tears well up in his eyes. He felt despair wrap its cold cruel hands around his whole being. Where were his values? Did he ever even have any? How could Becky have loved this? She would be mortified if she saw what he had let himself become.

Ronnie, who had been eyeing Danny anxiously but respecting his need for silence, got up, walked around the table, put a hand on Danny's shoulder, squeezed it, and left the room. A few minutes after Ronnie left, Danny emailed his resignation, wrote a check with most of his money to the organization Becky worked with and was so passionate about, canceled his meeting, and went back home.

Danny had decided to go to China and see his brother Bobby, a Buddhist monk. He needed out of the city and he needed to grieve. The serenity of a temple was perfect for that. Who knows, maybe he would join the monastery himself. "Maybe, but I'm not shaving my head," he mused.

My Journey To The Island

I Would like to start this off by saying how much i loathe the source from which all my inspiration stems. However, without it I seem to do no meaningful writing what so ever. Irony, I'm lovin' it. So, I usually think along the lines of emotions, and how to over come them. I have thought myself a sort of genius as i was able to belittle the power our emotions have over us. In my opinion, it is our own psyche that controls our emotions. Manipulate your psyche, you manipulate your emotions and attitudes toward a certain situation or ordeal. The flaw in my reasoning is that i thought that I had found a cure. But how can i assume i have when i never looked for the source of that which had ailed me? You can only effectively fix something if you know how at works because once you do you can single out that which is not working properly. Otherwise, what i have deemed to be a solution is only a temporary numbing of emotional turmoil, but not a cure. It's a way to numb ourselves, which in its own right is useful for its own purposes. I wonder though, would ignoring an issue that is causing emotional distress cause the problem to fester?

I have been having radical, unexplainable emotional patterns. I remind myself of a pregnant lady. Sudden outburst of rage, nervousness, irritability, and unexplainable friendliness to people i had been extremely prejudiced against, to mention a few. All this could happen within the hour, but as random as my behavior is there is always that unyielding, unwavering feeling of unease. Something is missing, and the cliche "there's a hole inside" would definitely apply to the way i have been feeling. It feels like i can not try to subdue these emotions without knowing why i feel the way i do. So, I started digging for answers, experimenting. The first experiment was to alienate people. I reasoned that if the people we care about the most are the ones with the most power to hurt us, then no one should be in a position where they can do any real harm. So, i decided to push my friends back. I did not want any trouble to come from the push though, so i did not end up pushing them as much as i pushed against them and let myself slide back. i found it to be a effective way not to alert them to any change. after all, some of the biggest changes that happen tend to be ones we barely notice or pay any mind to during our daily lives. kind of like the immense speed we are revolving with the Earth through space. Point being that it was a smooth transition from having many close friends to barely any at all. That, regretfully, was not enough to solve the problem. There was more that had to change.Logically, if there is a problem now, it must have been caused by something in the past. My past, however, is not something i enjoy visiting. For the sake of piece of mind though, i plunged as deep into its recesses as i could and found one particularly interesting thing.There are many things that have happened in the past that i do not know how i feel about. I am finding that intense emotions are hard to recognize. i caught myself wondering if i was extremely crushed or immensely relieved by a certain development. No wonder i felt uneasy.A past riddled with confused emotions is no easy thing to cure, and i am not naive enough to think i can find the answer to any question i pose to myself, or that any of my answers or solutions are right. Even if the methods i use to remedy what ails me work in their own right, like i already mentioned, it has so far merely been sedation. I wanted to know why i felt the way i did, and i was able to figure out why the same situation made me happy and upset at the same time, not that it was any help. The problem was with the sheer number of emotions which for the most part were hard to identify in most situations. So, like one would deny a disease to spread from a limb throughout the body, i decided to cut the problem at its source. I tried to get rid of my need for contact with people, but the attempt was as ridiculous as the notion sounds. it was not going to happen. instead, i began to give people reasons to want nothing to do with me. i would lead people to the decide that i am someone they should keep their distance from, if not cut off completely. I could not keep myself trying to get close to people forever, but i could definitely sabotage my chances.needless to say, casting myself away on an island worked to keep me from getting into any new trouble. Except there is certain contact we need as humans, the damn unreliable and flawed creatures that we are, and i find myself yearning more than ever for that contact. My reason has marooned me on an island and is keeping me from building a signal fire to attract the boats that are my salvation.

It seems that i have prevented the recurrence for a problem at great cost. It is starting to feel like the costs out weigh the benefits of my decision. Still, as long as i remind myself that i do not really need that contact, that the only harm it can do to me is psychological, i should be fine. People can not have power over me because if there is one thing i have learned from my past experiences is that some emotional wounds are deep enough that they never stop gushing blood. As for my psyche, i should be fine as long as i keep a firm hold on the part it is playing. that part being, mostly, to make me thing i need that contact when it is no more than another want.

Ramblings

what next? is this it? Is there nothing more? am i supposed to follow the routine life cycle? find a job, start a family...? how cliche is that? What mark will i leave on the world? There has to be more to life than this. It is not easy to be told to give up on your dreams. That, "You're so young and naive, you'll start to see things clearly when life starts slapping you in the face." It is frustrating because i can not decide which is worse, getting slapped in the face by someone who cares, or rolling the dice and hoping that life doesn't stick its studded boot up my inexperienced rectum. I can't help but tell myself that no matter how hard i try, there will always be someone trying harder.
is it naive to say that i would rather be fighting for a cause? what if i acknowledge that no matter how hard we fight, we're always going to come up short? it's just that everything is so out of our control that it's scary. There's only so much we can do to help others, and it is almost inevitable that we come up short. times like this i feel like the best life to live is that of a soldier, fighting to protect others. but isn't the protection of some, the doom of others? is life so trivial that it is to be thrown away for something as ludicrous as a conflict of opinions? Who are we to pick up a weapon and decide who dies? Are we not the ones that our enemies are protecting their families from? The same enemies we made under the excuse of protection our own? Still, I believe the life of the soldier is the one to live. Sever all connections u ever made, and fight for peace. Yes, ironically enough, there has to be conflict before there can be peace. The same thing goes to peace of mind i guess. Regretfully, its hard to tell how long internal conflict will as it is to tell for actual violent conflict. How do u even make the right choice. What is a right choice, really? Sparing some one's life so they could kill countless others? Wrong choice? Is killing them the right one? What if someone were to join the army for the sake of protecting his fellow soldiers? Do my country men deserve my protection more than the people they're after?
As far as I'm concerned, death is peace of mind, and so it is welcome. I don't fear it. I believe it's all we truly have to live for.