Last Night Was a Good Night

By Jonathon Nixon, LMFT

It’s only been a few days, but I am feeling a little more optimistic than I was in the past couple days (see last blog: “Today Was a Sad Day.”)  So, I can’t help but ask myself -- what is now different?

My first immediate answer, nothing really.  I mean I’m still going through the same motions and same routines related to my life, and really the only thing that I did was different in the past few days was that I was able to take a long walk the night before and make some new connections of thought that might have helped ease some of my dread. 

I’ve always been a child of the night and there has always been something just so comforting when it comes to the vacant streets and sleepy neighborhoods that stay illuminated through the dirty orange coloring that radiates from municipal light posts and patio lamps from the houses that outline a cities inhabitance.  There was something pleasant about the previous night, maybe it was the rustling of the dry wind that shuffled the autumn leaves within the shadows behind me, or maybe it was how the crescent moon had a particular shine that chased away most of the constellations that surrounded its luminous glow?  Whatever It was, it was powerful enough to remind me just how small I was in the overall scheme of nature. 

I believe that there is a constant tension between the laws that manage one’s mind and the laws that manage the reaches of nature.  For the mind, it possesses within itself its own hollows, a universe that goes well beyond the cavities of one’s conscious thought and can bring forth such fears that an individual can isolate themselves from the figments this internal universe can project into our physical world.  While nature knows not of subjectivity, but only deals with an objective balance.  A balance that demands participation and obedience when one ventures to deep within their conscious pools.  For within the hollows of itself, nature is the master of substance where fantasy has no form and one constantly is reawakened into larger realities in which they are merely specks. 

Last night was a blessing because the time between yesterday’s sunset and tomorrow’s sunrise reminded me how insignificant I can be – in a good way.  A pleasant reminder of how the grief and sorrow I can extract from this world are sometimes nothing more but the products of my own imagination and have no place within the balance that keeps the moon hanging high within the night sky and the trees that wiggle from an October wind. Last night, I felt better.