I read something in another blog that made me focus on an occasional fluttering in the back of my head. A lot of us, probably most, have something in our personal histories that we wish never happened. Certainly we don’t want to admit to its existence, which feels like glaring proof of our embarrassing past idiocy. I have a few of those. Sometimes something would remind me of one, causing me to wince uncomfortably, and my brain would try to change to subject. (Along the same lines, Diana just wrote to me in an email, “i would never to admit [my] awful experience except to those who already knew. i would comment on [the other blog entry] but it reminds me of too many things that i rather just forget. “)

Cirque du Soleil my junior year in high school, for instance; I allowed myself to get caught up in Grace’s enthusiasm to ditch the show during intermission and walk across the street to South Coast Plaza so that she could buy her then-boyfriend an anniversary present and surprise him. Thinking only of being a good friend and not a responsible officer of the high school club we had taken out there by 3 chartered buses, I offered to carry the goody she bought so that her boyfriend wouldn’t suspect she got him something, and subsequently she and I got in the biggest trouble of our lives for a stupid decision, and I was blamed for leading the decision, which I did not deny, all in the name of being a good friend.

One day, I’m supposed to look back on that day and laugh. Today is not that day. Maybe if Grace were alive, we’d be laughing at it tomorrow. She would tell me, though, that that incident is but a small eddy in the tsunamis of our lives. And she’d be right. There has been larger things since; stupider decisions that impacted me in more detrimental ways than a scalding lecture from some teachers, embarrassment in front of my peers, and a Saturday Swap (detention) at the high school. I look back at my decisions and wonder if I knew better at the time. I’d like to think that I knew what I was in for but just gritted my teeth against the hope that it’d turn out in my favor as I stepped into a calculated risk. I’d like to think that I don’t stumble clumsily, without cognition, on a tightrope while grinning like a dope, a froth of drool hanging off my lower lip. Of course that’s not me. I think way too much about life to have that ever be me. But is it better to see a pitfall and register a pitfall and fall into it anyway?

No one likes to look back and diagnose their past experiences as just a symptom of stupidity. And yet on the larger, more recent hurt that I’ve endured, I know I’d always suspected. Maybe even expected. Then why was I there? Why did I constantly talk myself into thinking it’d all be okay?

Maybe because it is. I look around me, and the shit I had to sift through has become fertilizer for my riches in life now. Great new friends (from one of whom also springs this blog), great life, new appreciation, clearer eyes. I can’t say I didn’t know what “bad” was before I had to learn it the hard way. Sure I knew. But it’s better defined now, and I can smell it a mile away like the ammonia- and sulfur-emitting rotting carcass of some unnamed evil. With the clearer definition of “bad” came my clearer recognition of “good.” I have that in my life now, too. I used to say, “I don’t need to be cheated on to know that cheating’s bad; why did I have to learn this lesson myself?” Au contraire. There are so many gifts that spring out of the manure that we couldn’t ever see before for the stench of the manure.

And maybe, that’s the meaning of life.