The Boxer

It's the Simon and Garfunkel song with the verse: "In the clearing stands the Boxer... and he carries the reminders, etc."

Getting reflective about who and where I am in life and I find the mind does turn to old injuries. Get over it, you say? Well, yeah. Getting over it and not remembering are two different things. I remember a workshop I took once where one of the things the workshop leader talked about was injuries to the body, and how in most cases unless we do some pretty careful physical therapy, the compensation we do for the injury incorporates it more or less permanently in our bodies.

I suspect it is not much different for our mental processes. We do forget and we do let go, but we compensate and it changes the ways we react when we encounter situations that are reminiscent of the original injury. The mind as well as the body protects itself. Sometimes the way it does that doesn't help us a lot.

I went to a 50th high school reunion last year, despite having attended 4 different high schools. I picked the one that had been the best year, and probably in the long run made the biggest difference in my life. It was a good thing to do even though there were less than 3 or 4 people who I remembered and none who remembered me. I got a little tired of explaining that I had only been there for my junior year. I did talk with a woman who I am pretty sure I had one movie date to a French film with. She didn't remember, but curiously the man she had married who was there had been in my graduating high school class in a different school in a city a thousand miles distant. The best thing that happened was making friends with a man who shared work acquaintances from later in my life, and listening to him gripe that some of our classmates "didn't listen much when they were in high school, and still didn't."

I think he was carrying a little of the baggage I'm talking about. Those not so pleasant intereactions, like the patronizing forty-something manager laying me off at 61, along with two other incredibly competent colleagues, so he could take our jobs or hand them out to his friends. Okay, that one is a little hard to let go of. I guess the ones that fall into that category are the ones where the other is acting from something other than disinterest and clean motives and gets away with it.

It's Durocher's "Nice guys finish last," but it makes me ask myself a couple of questions. Did I really "finish last?' No. "Am I really a "nice guy?" Not always.

I think I need to go away and think about this a bit more.