I've got those jet pack blues

2017 was a benchmark year in which I’ve reached my highest highs and discovered what’s been truly missing.

Insert traditional "I never write here anymore" line followed by an approximation of how long I'll make it through this post before I delete it. Life is generally good. I have wonderful friends, a wonderful girlfriend, an actual career path, and a pretty great living situation with a dear friend. My family is growing both physically and in numbers, on the verge of being an uncle the 5th time over this upcoming July. Most importantly, I feel...good. Confident. Secure. Things I used to dread I'd never feel. Things found in my foils all around me. My time of a perpetual cog in my own machine has seemingly ended, and I don't feel the habitual contrarian in my personality anymore. I'm actually helping and connecting with people in a way I always wanted. I have seen the worth in myself and what is to respect and to be respected about my own life. I am, at long last, on the path to become the person I've dreamt of becoming. And yet now more than ever... the fire is dim. I'd like to imagine that my writing of all kinds served as more than just a distraction or antidepressant. If it is, well, I'm having trouble accepting that. I'm hitting the second time this year of intense nostalgia, both in a good way and quite the contrary. In these last four or so years I've had to adjust to drastic change. And with that, I've allowed everything to be disposable at a moment's notice; Home is not tied to a location anymore, it's what I carry with me. Home, security, and meaning become less and less every year. For the last few years, I've believed that was right. Yet maybe my resistive nature to change is not as suppressed as I might've thought. At some point over the last entire year, I looked around and too much was changing. I outright stopped EVERYTHING I'd set my future on, in one way or another. A part of me that's felt like mandatory nuts and bolts of my being feels like it doesn't exist anymore. Things feel less visceral and more logical. Not always a bad thing, mind you, but it's more than just writing something catchy, or having a cool idea that begs your curiosity. It's the restlessness. The thrill. It's the 3 A.M. daydreams. It's being kept up at night by everything wonderful that makes you, you. A youthful passion; naive, maybe. Probably. But you don't care. You're too busy following the path at this bewitching hour, when there's seemingly no one there but you. Your engine is revving, it's a wide open highway. And you know nothing else but to floor it. Back in that "phase of my life" called All of a Kind, I wrote something with a friend called (please forgive the unbearably high-school title) "Delivering God's Rejuvenation". For the sake of my own potential embarrassment, DGR for short. DGR is most likely a seminal piece of work in my life. I listened to it the other day for the first time in what felt like years, and it's as if, with my ear pressed firmly against the metal, I finally moved the last tumblers and rediscovered the combination to my own safe. It all made sense after this. Seminal moments don't feel like seminal moments anymore. Every drip of water has a thousand ripples while I'm still looking for the boulder to throw into the pond. It's acting before reacting. At the risk of this becoming your standard "getting older" passage, let me state that I quite like many of these new traits about myself. I like my preparedness. I like my confidence. I like not shitting my pants with nerves all the time. I don't like my lack of new risks. I don't like my lack of focus. I don't like my lack of new 3 A.M. daydreams. But I do like my life. And the people in it. It's just been an awfully long time since I've taken them on an adventure...