Viewing Life From Outerspace

This probably seems creepy and somewhat desperate and sad, but I couldn't help myself today. I woke up horribly exhausted this morning and barely got myself out for my Friday morning ride. I was glad I did because I always feel a little better after I warm up a bit and somewhat cheery towards the end of the ride. Of course I've been in and out of this funk lately and it's getting old. I just don't see a happy ending in my near future. So here's the weird part. I'm sure most everyone has done it, but I kind of took it to the extreme.

I google mapped the home in which I grew up and zeroed in on the satellite view. I just explored the old neighborhood back in Massachusetts and just let my mind wander. I guess it was kind of a life review of sorts. Retracing places I lived, I started thinking about certain points in my life growing up. I just started wondering where it went wrong and where things went right. It's pretty amazing how life meanders through time and space, bouncing in different directions, interacting with others fates and follies. I feel like a pinball. Life's truly amazing in where it takes us. I even brought up a calendar and started looking up when specific dates of events in my life occurred. I studied how certain events converged almost miraculously in many instances to change my life and even my thinking profoundly.

I came across the date that I met Cathy (my best friend/wife). I think of how slim the chance was that we would meet thirty-three years ago on October 17th 1976. So many things could have happened to keep us from meeting at that point in time. The odds are really mind boggling. Thirteen years later on the same exact date October 17th 1989 I had just exited the lower deck of the Cypress section 880 Freeway, when it collapsed behind me in the Loma Prieta earthquake. I thought of all the things that could have held me up a minute. There were so many things that could have happened during the day that I could have been held up just enough to have been crushed in the collapse. It still weirds me out to this day.

When I was young I used to stand in my back yard many nights by myself for what seemed like hours just staring off into space into the night sky and wondering what was to come. It's so amazing that I can look back through a computer through a satellite from space down to where I stood and have the answer. I wish there was a way that I could communicate to myself where I would be now. It's been great, it's been very bad at times, but it's been quite interesting. I don't know if I would tell myself what I should have, or shouldn't have done. I think the creepy part is It feels weirdly voyeuristic being able to look back on my life and see in two dimensions through a satellite and my own memory my whole life. It's actually painful in many ways. The many things I believed, but were so wrong. The opportunities I passed on so many times due to my erroneous concepts of life in general.

I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this, but I feel like I'm getting to a point right now that it's coming to a head. It's going to be either really bad, or something will change profoundly and I'll get out of this stage in my life and move on to something new and hopeful. There's been a convergence, it's coming together right now, like a slow motion train wreck and I'm the hapless conductor praying to reach the track switch before the other train meets me head on. I've never been down to the wire like this...I'm watching it from outer space, looking down and hoping that person down there gets to where he's going with a happy ending...