It's interesting to live at least part of your life in plain sight. When I've written I've been pretty straightforward, warts and all. I have no internal auditing system and quite like that about myself. I've let you know me. But I've been hiding...

   The last few months, I've been so wrapped up in getting the jagged pieces of my life to fit smoothly together again, I haven't even thought about sharing any part of myself. The severely broken heart last summer, the grueling custody battle and subsequent exhiliarating win, the ups and downs of my business, the (very personal) failure of our criminal system, the disappointment in the outright breakdown, no, total corruption, of our political system, and on and on. It's been exhausting enough dealing with this life's vagueries internally, no less externally. But of late, I'm seeing life very differently, and really liking what I see. So I'm back, and, again, you're stuck with me.

   I try to smile before I open my eyes every day. I struggle, most days successfully, to ignore the bruises from all the kicks I've taken while down. I've never thought of myself as an optimist, per se, but realise I am in the purest sense of the word. Because, though things may not always go well, or even just okay, I seem to constantly strive for, and continue to hope that, they will. And that's no mean feat.

   My son, who's now four-and-a-half, has a lot to do with it. In March, when I first won my custody fight and began having him live with me almost half the time, it was tough on us both. After learning so little about each other in the first few years of his life, we began feeling our way through the strange minefield of father-son interaction surprisingly easily. The evolution of our relationship has been incredibly rapid, and we've achieved the gleeful dynamics of actually knowing each other. It's been emotionally freeing, and life affirming, for me. We laugh a lot, his laugh being perhaps the greatest drug I've ever had. And my two beautiful, wonderful daughters have each really come into their own, and become really whole people, and that just makes me kvell, (a Yiddish word, which very loosely translated, means "swell, or burst, with pride"). In these respects I am a very wealthy man.

   As a freestanding individual, though, I've long known there was something missing, something I had a brief glimpse of last year for the first time in my life, which only made it that much harder to recover when it so quickly vanished. Yet even in the face of that loss, I remained grateful for the experience, and have stayed friendly with, and cherished the friendship of, the wonderful person who gave it to me. I now realise that, too, makes me an optimist. And optimism evidently has it's rewards.

   I'm reaping those rewards now. By not having allowed that part of myself to shut down, I've recently been incredibly fortunate enough to have reconnected with a very old friend, someone I'd long admired for more valid reasons than I could even begin to list. It turns out the intervening years have put us in this amazing place where it seems to take no effort for us to be great now, and no limit to how great we will become. An absolutely unexpected blessing of the highest order.

   So this is optimism? I could really get used to this.....

        

 

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