Too Much Time

I've been a little pre-occupied in recent days (the competition for post-occupation is brutal) and I've had a chance this weekend to use the three days as an opportunity to decompress and reassess. I've been working on some things that were important to other people but didn't have much value to me.

We all live like that sometimes. We give our time to total strangers and then discover we need to shift scheduling priorities but those to whom we gave the gift of our time now see it as an entitlement and they have hard feelings when something they've grown accustomed to is rationed or curtailed. What were once vices are now habits and what began as voluntary is seen as mandatory.

I've gotten a little too old to continue to live for the reflection of approval in other people's eyes-I've discovered that for some time-maybe a few weeks or even months-I'd lost track of that hard-acquired fact. In the last couple of days, the sometimes petulant reaction of those who have no legitimate claim to my time and talents when I've placed myself first has reminded me that self-abnegation is not a virtue others applaud, but, rather, abuse.

We all work our way through valleys that sometime feel like chasms. This one has been a little deeper and little wider than I'm used to but I put that down to having close to a full lifetime's experiences now, unlike when I was a child. I'm putting away the things of childhood and what's left in its place has the attractiveness and the danger of the new and untried. That's a path I haven't walked in a long time. I'm thinking it's high time I went.
-bill kenny