Just Me

Here I go again.

I am starting to see where this can be great therapy. It has been a trying time for the last few days and writing here seems to give me a chance to release some of the angst. Darilyn is still in the recovery cycle from the latest valley. She is weak. She has not really eaten in the last 3 days. We have managed to maintain fluid intake and some caloric intake but nothing solid as it is very difficult to swallow. So soft foods and liquid nutrients have been the order of the day. But we are coming out of it.

I can write about her and some of what I feel when it concerns her. But why is it I can not touch on other feeling that I have running through my mind? I have spent my entire life denying that there are other things that go on in my mind and person because I do not think they are important enough that anyone would want to know about them. I have always felt that I am not important in the scheme of things and I do not wish to impose myself on anyone. This has been my life's mantra I guess. And there is not really a big chance that I will ever change it.

Who am I? I wonder. Who is this old man? What have I done with my life that will ever justify the existence I have had? Does it really matter? Maybe these are questions that others have asked themselves and maybe they have found their answers. Maybe I will find mine someday.

I have a memory that has been haunting me lately. I have thought about what I believe in life and one of the the main things I have concluded is the law of family. Now this is a series of three basic laws that I stole from a greater man, Isacc Asimov. I modified the basic structure of his 3 laws of robotics to conform to my needed 3 laws of family. Here they are, maybe again.

1. Take care of your family. It is the most important thing in your existence. Allow nothing to harm the family, no matter what you must do insure the survival and protection of the family.

2. Take care of the individual members of your family, as long as it does not bring or cause harm to the entire family. Be there for them and provide for them whatever you can anytime they need it. It is up to each member of the family to provide for all of the others and to protect them at all times.

3. Take care of yourself as long as it does not interfere with laws 1 and 2. All others are your primary concern and you should only worry about yourself when all the others are provided for and protected.

Now this may look like a strange philosophy and it probably is a little off center, but it has always been the way I have seen life. And it is only recently that I began to understand what started it. I do not think this is something that I got from dad, but he was somewhat this way as well. I believe it started with a book I read when I was about 15 years of age. I did not remember much about it other than the story. I did not know the author or the name of the characters or the name of the book. It was just a book that I read and enjoyed. But later in life I became interested in the books of Louis Lamour and much to my surprise I found that I was reading the story again. The name of the book was "Sackett". It was a major formative factor in my life. Mr Lamour wrote many books about the Sackett family over the course of his life and I have tried to read them all as they mean a great deal to me. They may show someone what I felt and what I wanted for my family if someone else should ever read them. And it may be why I am a cowboy who will never grow up.

So with that piece of nonsense out of my system, I say adios.