Hope and Value

I was reading a bit of St Augustine today and he was noting that those things which are lost and recovered are valued more highly than the good things which always are and that the road which is most difficult ends with the sweetest reward. I was thinking how that applied to my current situation. There is at the moment pretty significant hope that I can return to my home in Colorado for good in the next few weeks.

This applies especially because three years ago when I was working a mediocre job that I had had for five years, I continually chafed at a situation that had become rigorously prosaic. I thought there must be some way to lead a fuller life. Ironically it is just that life that I have been aching to resume for the better part of two years. It is true, however, that you cannot go back to the same place you left. I have lived a full year with lessons and failures. I am not the man who left.

William Butler Yeats had an interesting theory of time as a helix. Life often brought you back to a place two dimensionally similar to a point in your history, but it was different in the third dimension. Picture a huge spiral staircase climbing toward fruition. You look down to see the same scape from the same angle, but now at a greater distance. The movement of life makes similar experience different by the factor by which you have grown since being presented with the situation previously.

I would hope that a few years from now I would be able to hold the preciousness of those things which are of true value in light of the perspective that I have gained over my exile, but I know better. I, perhaps more than most, am focused too intently on what lies over the ridge line to see the wildflowers strewn about my feet. One day perhaps I will stop preparing and begin. One can hope anyway.