It Can Only End In Tears

It was the second night into the week long walk with my sons and friends. An event I had planned for over a year. In my head it was going to be a time of banter, and laughter, and good conversations, and walking, and an evening pint or two, followed by some sleep beneath the stars.

You can see how it looked in my head, even if it isn’t something that might appeal to you.

But quite a lot of things in that idea were very quickly bent and battered out of shape, by that bugger we call Reality.

It was only the second night in. And for the first time in a long time I felt myself to be in a very dark place. A return to a long gone, if not forgotten, Miserable Me. Self pity and loathing, those dang dogs, reared their ugly heads and barked at me through a sleepless night. The rain lashed down. A quagmire within and without.

That kind of thing.

And you don’t even need to know the relevant details. Perhaps you’d like to, but I can’t really explain adequately. I don’t want to anyway, at least not now, it turns out.

The thing is…. tears were cried. They’ve been cried in the past. They’ll be cried again in the future. Yet strangely, on this occasion, and for the first time ever, I could stand back and notice in the midst of the storm:

“This is how I feel now. It will end”.

And it did. I think that simple act of noticing it all without judgement, at least at certain moments, helped to change my outlook. By morning things weren’t so bad. Nobody had died. Good things emerged, both immediately and later too.

It was another experience had. Another happening happened. And, in a different form, continued happening. Looking back, I can smile.

They say, and I’ve sung, that It Can Only End In Tears. But these days I know that other possibilities are available.

If I use myself as the measure, I’m going to call that progress.