I started this quest on 01 January 2014.  Today is 02 March 2014.  This not being a leap year, I calculate this as day sixty.

My posts have gone from litannies about things that bothered me as to which I bit my tongue in the moment, to memories of my long-dead brother, and celebrations of the blessings in my life. Along the way, I’ve tried to share stories of encounters that brought me joy,  prompted deep reflection, or challenged my resolve to live complaint-free.

My objective, too, has changed.  My original thought centered on simply engaging with others on a positive plane, rather than a critical one.  In these two months, my course has become one of a personal transformation, a confrontation of old ghosts and a decluttering of the closets in which those ghosts lurk.  I’ve started to throw open the doors in the backrooms of my mind, my heart and my soul.  I’ve hauled out the cleaning supplies, and have begun shaking the broom at the bats and cobwebs.

Everybody’s lives present challenges.  Life is not a competitive sport.  The trials and tribulations that I have experienced impact me no more deeply than any other person’s travails scar them.  Or, if they do, I am not more entitled to sympathy or consideration than any other person.  I’ve known people with greater physical challenges than I face; more chaotic childhoods; far greater financial distress.  Stripped to our essence, all of us deserve compassion.  Each of us needs support.  The dance of life demands choreography that entwines us in ways that allow us to lift one, then the other, rising and falling with the swell of the music.

Time and again, I reflect on one of my earliest literary influences,  Lillian Hellman’s book, Pentimento.  She describes the process of an artist’s covering one oil painting with another, and the later effect of the aging process.  As the oil paint flakes, the work beneath is revealed.  Hellman used the stories in Pentimento to expose her past and examine it.

I feel my evolution doing the same thing.  As I abandon negative ways of relating to people, the layers of paint with which I have coated the past begin to crumble.  While this process started for me without Hellman’s deliberate pursuit, nonetheless, I find myself drawn to what lies beneath the veneer.

I can’t say whether, as Hellman did, I will be able to examine my past with the maturity of age and its tempering wisdom.  When the top layer has all been scraped away, I cannot say whether I will like the picture which lies beneath.  But I raise a scraping tool, and flake away the crumbling surface.  This I know:  It has served its purpose, and now must give way to what lies beneath.