You would not be completely out of place to question my sobriety, based purely on listening to the voices in my head that get heard on this site. Many of my actions seem hasty, brash, and unconsidered.

But I’ve not gotten this far in my life without learning a few tricks.  I’m adaptable, and my overly analytical side does have its benefits. If I was capable of long-term strategizing, I’d be a brilliant chess player; sadly, while I can run through the possibilities (what we computer programmers might think of as a tree search) faster and more completely than is apparent on the surface, I haven’t the patience to consider the statistical odds of a given board position eighteen moves down the lines.

When considering an action, I ponder the best and worst possible consequences, as well as the most likely (always somewhere in the middle).  Once you’ve realized the worst-case scenario, you simply decide: is the reward you gain from your action worth the highest potential cost to yourself? If so, take the action (with the caveat that you have to accept the outcome gracefully and graciously; do everything with dignity, even eating humble pie).

And I follow my gut, that feeling that simultaneously resides at the base of your skull and in the pit of your stomach.  Logic and reason are wonderful, and help in the measuring game outlined above, but all the animals that came before us on this earth have survived so much longer than us on instinct. It’s a powerful tool that we are too often wrongly taught to ignore.

It’s good that I am adaptable, because the specifics of my life introduce a lot of change.  I’m not complaining; after all, it’s largely by choice.  A simple twist here and there on my lifestyle, and I become just another fish caught up in the tide, floating wherever it takes me, sedentary and simple.

Sometimes the changes are spread out, considerate of the rest of the things on my mind.  Sometimes they come hard and fast, an onslaught, one after another with no end in sight.  When it rains, it pours.  But that’s life, and you do the best you can to roll with the punches while considering the best way out with as little damage to yourself as possible.  And that’s in the worst case scenario; I much prefer the situations where I am trying to maximize the good, as opposed to minimizing the negative.

Sitting on your hands and worrying, stressing, crying or screaming at the gods with shaking fists does nothing except make you feel worse.  It doesn’t stop the change, it doesn’t make things better, it doesn’t heal the wounds or fix what is broken.  You have to figure out what is within your realm of control and what is out of your hands, and then you have to accept that those things are what they are.  Clint Eastwood’s crusty Gunny Highway in Heartbreak Ridge put it in my head in my teens: “Improvise.  Adapt.  Overcome.”

It always seemed honorable to me, and still does.

It’s not change that I have issues with; it’s the changing, often the initiation thereof, that is the worst.  My moments with CL are far better than I could ever have hoped for with a girlfriend, but I could never have gotten here without the divorce.  And yeah, the divorce process itself sucked, and there were a lot of moments of pain involved, but once the transition was done, I realized that Point B was no worse than Point A, and probably even better, in some ways.  Alternate (and far less poetic) analogy: I can’t wait to move, to be in my new apartment with hardwood floors and air-conditioning and bathroom light that works, but the packing and unpacking and address changing and utility switchover and seemingly infinite trips up and down stairs with boxes in hand may be my new least favorite activity ever.

Change is good.  It keeps life from becoming dull without introducing the need for drama or man-made excitement. And it’s a big part of life.  It pays to learn to deal with it, if not to enjoy it.  And, if all else fails, drinking heavily is both a good painkiller and scapegoat for your decisions.

Hey, I never said I wasn’t drunk.