An unexpected Tuesday morning letter....

It’s 2 am.

I’ve been up all night. Not from my usual all day long obsession with strong black coffee, but from thinking. I am constantly plagued by an affliction of doing my best “life thinking” at night. 

Or early morning, when the rest of the world is asleep and the barn cats hunt and white owls swoop around noiselessly to frighten unsuspecting midnight wanderers.

I finally give up on sleep. I have laid with both eyes tightly shut for hours and all I can see is a constant grainy reel of some old home movie I don’t remember from my childhood. 

Tonight, I am thinking of letters. And chances. And futures.

What is it you seek? What is it you work for? What do you greet the day with?

Do you work for money? For status? For the love of a few good things? Or to put food on the table for a good woman?

What did you dream of as a child? Your soaring aspirations, your crazy dreams you never even whispered to the darkness of early morning for fear it would laugh. The hidden longings you hid even from those closest to you, knowing that the twinkle in their eye though accompanied with understanding can kill a dream faster than anything.

When you slide in between bed sheets, bedroll canvas or swing on hammock ropes at night what do you fall asleep dreaming of?

Those are the deepest longings of your heart.

When you wake and see that first glimpse of early morning light or freezing cold un-arrived dawn what is the first thing you think of?

That is the deepest longing and wish of you heart.

Did you go to work today passionate, excited and thinking of all the ways that this step in your life will take you to the pinnacle of your aspirations?

Return worn to the bone and satisfied knowing that the world might be a better place, someone’s life affected positively or just the subtle joy of knowing you have dirty hands from a hard days work that made you feel only partially human?

Or did you sit, watching the world pass by. Talk of other people, doing the things you long your brain would allow your heart to reach for? Wish that you were them, write a page while waiting for the day to be over before beginning again tomorrow about what you will do one day?

Don’t wait for one day.

Because one day, you are going to wake up and you will be 75 and wonder why it hurts to get out of bed in the morning. Why the words of Tennyson and Hemingway seem so far away now, why your hand shakes at morning coffee…and why you never took the chance and chased the deepest longings of your heart.

What about her? The one that you knew, that you felt pull on the cords in your heart that make you feel alive. The feeling that only men and war and rough country and a good woman can bring about.

Did you let her go? Or have you been so busy drowning out the longings of your heart for so long that you forgot to answer when she said hello?

Are you still sitting there?

Sipping your coffee with clean hands that have not yet begun to shake with age and memories?

What are you waiting for?

Chase the deepest longings of your heart, only you know them and only you can catch them.

xoxo

~Adrian