Maintenance

“I have been judged and wrongly convicted without a real chance to explain myself. I have felt extreme sadness, paralyzing anxiety, and major disappointment. But I do not try to forget these moments. In fact, I visit all of them from time to time. I go to find sadness and discontent on my terms in a time and place of my choosing. I do not wait for the next difficult moment in my life to try a patch together some form of emergency perspective. Instead, I occasionally lie down on the floor and listen to songs that rouse these terrible memories. As I revisit my hardest of times the tears run down my face and fill my ears. These dark pilgrimages are not methods of punishment or grim destinations of self-pity but, on the contrary, these retrospective forays give value to the pains of my past. They allow me to live in a constant state of perspective. More importantly the sadness and discontent literally become the fertilizer of happiness. Living in a state of maintained perspective enables one to embrace the true value of current joy and creates a psychological coping mechanism to mitigate the inevitable pain of future difficulties.”