Z, your playlist is Nas approved 😜

Another resonant quote from the article you shared is this one:
“I think that the greatest challenge of both thru-hiking and grief is accepting what is rather than what could or should be.”
If I may muse for a second: I have personally seen that quote get a little bit bastardized. Completely decoupling it (haha) from any notion of reconciliation, I like the quote and the should part I completely agree with. But depending on what the grief is and what the circumstances are, the could part can be a gray area. Thinking about “what could be” could be (haha again) part of one’s growth. “Could” to me is part of possibility and possibility is part of l/arises from self-awareness.

Totally agree with Madluv.

What a wonderful share and so true. I don’t think we ever stop trying to make some sense of it all, but this is the one thing that trying to make sense of it is senseless. Once we get to a better place the trauma still remains. Like any trauma based from love. You can’t really ever fully escape it, but there is happiness and joy still to be had. Thank you for sharing

Hi Thundarr. Congrats on your practice and upcoming marriage. And I’m very sorry for the loss of your friend. I think that loss, especially at this stage of our lives, automatically leads to a lot of existential reflection.

I have to say my first response to your most recent post was to say that I don’t think of MLC as a psychosis that comes out of nowhere with no signs or something that a person has no control over. I think I know enough to know I don’t know enough, but my thought has always been that a lot of it has to do with poor coping mechanisms, lack of sense of self, unhealed psychological wounding… And did I mention poor coping mechanisms? Having never even been taught the things that most people are taught from a young age, having basically built myself from scratch starting in infancy alone with no external support or guidance, having endured extreme abuse of all forms in my life, as well as dealing with the gruesome fallout of the end of my marriage at the same time as a very long, very difficult, very lonely battle with cancer, I can honestly say I have never for a single second been worried that I was going to sleep with someone else’s partner, lie, cheat, steal, go on a spending spree with money I don’t have, gamble, treat people like $h!te, say horrible nasty things to people, make anyone cry, abandon people for no reason, or anything else that falls under the umbrella of what we attribute to MLC.
In short, I’ve never for a second worried that I’m going to have anything close to what we refer to as MLC. Because I don’t think that someone having a crisis is entirely unaware of their behavior or in a psychosis at the level that they cannot control themselves. We all make choices in our lives. It’s my personal opinion that many people, perhaps most people, make their choices based on some kind of deeply held survival instinct, which doesn’t mean that their survival is at risk but just that it is so deeply ingrained in them to seek out, react and respond based on what they think they need to survive, and often that makes people make selfish choices, or more nuanced, self-serving choices that sometimes hurt other people. But I don’t think there are very many cases of people who have absolutely no control over their actions or the choices they’re making. That’s just my personal opinion, for what it’s worth.

Sounds like a whole new adventure, SS!



JB