these are days that must happen

The thing to remember is that there are days like this and these are days that must happen.I’ve been thinking about life going on and paths taken and moments lived until...you know...there aren’t any options and you stay in one place and there you die.Yesterday I had a talk with a friend whose company just went back to their home in South Africa. They will be too old to travel out of South Africa again and they will never leave. The sad thing is that they wanted things to be different.This was a very small part of a very long and lovely conversation but that’s the small part which grabbed hold of my heart. It has me thinking of some relatives who still live in the Czech Republic and would wish to live elsewhere. It has me thinking of all the people who are stuck where they are without hope of immigration...without hope of a better life. I feel their resignation. And it’s sad.The logical part of my brain(the one I have a habit of arguing with) tells me it’s ok...that’s the way it goes...and anyway people are born in one place, it makes sense that they will die someplace too and their death will be marked in history like their birth was.It’s really hard to listen to logic sometimes.Because then, then I find myself standing in the wrong line and look longingly at the line I judge as the right line and berate myself for making the wrong judgement call. And I judge that that’s such a silly thing to be doing. And my heart begins to close up like a nautical telescope. I’d rather leave my heart open and feel this sadness and live thru this day.Isn’t it overwhelming sometimes? This living, this trying to live a full life. The duck-downy pinkness of my heart is full of a terrible sadness, an empathy and a mourning for those people, for all people (who I don’t even know), for their stuck-ness, for the end of dreams...the ending of dreams...certain dreams.I don’t want the certainty of ending up in someplace. Maybe that why I’m so unsettled, so hard to pin down. I look at the butterflies pinned to boards and framed behind glass hanging on the walls in my house. I want to breathe life into them and set them free in a green and perfect land.What I really wanted to say to you, what I keep repeating to myself today, is that it’s alright to feel like this...to have days like this and that days like this must happen.There is such a longing for calm in my heart. I wish I could hold onto that calm and know that it would be somehow lasting.