Do you ever go down a residential street and feel a strange heartache? Not from feeling a dark pity for those who live there or a menacing jealousy. This is a heartache brought on by wonder of what else could have been. Not in a sense of missed opportunities or the ethically-troubling “there for the grace of God…,” but just a longing to know or understand the infinite other lives we could be leading right now. No? Just me? Whatevs.

When I feel this way, I wonder what other people’s lives are like in these homes. What is the day-to-day? Is there something they know, something they’ve unlocked that I haven’t and may never do? What have they seen or known, good/bad/indifferent, that I may never experience?

I thought about this often as I walked home to my flat in Glasgow some 7 years ago now. I’d look into the ground floor sitting rooms of lovely places and crummy places and everything in between and have that heartache for the lives I’d never know.

(As an aside, it should be noted that heartache is a comfortable state for me and not something I see as wholly negative. It is often satisfying. My mother claims this is because I was born into and spent my early years surrounded by family loss, tragedy, and heartache. This makes her feel guilty and I do not like that one bit.)

I thought it again recently as I drove through a coastal suburban street filled with bungalows and tidy yards and frosted bathroom windows. It is foreign to me and I felt an ache about it all that I couldn’t quite place or reconcile.

I love my life. I love my home. And I am also filled with an ever-present wanderlust. I want to try everything. I want to try being other people and living other places. But I am at peak comfort right now in both my location and self. Hot damn, I’ve made great strides of late in really loving who I am. This is a big deal for me. I’ve learned to not argue with compliments received. That’s a very big deal. It’s another phase or evolution/reinvention. Still, though, I have an itch for more. I just don’t know what that more is, nor do I believe I have the strength or interest to find out.

Anyway, I think that heartache is actually longing for access to unlimited alternate planes of existence where I could test out places and personalities and passions and careers and interests and selves. All somehow without any ramifications.

Let’s get on that, science. There’s just too much out there to miss out on.

The past crashed my dream and now I’m awake.

I was at the store the other day, dodging holiday shoppers as they filled carts with baking supplies and gift cards and perfume sets and bright plastic toys and television sets and the occasional bike wheeled alongside. People seemed pretty happy and not too stressed by it all. I walked around and got what I’d listed in my head as needing: salad greens, socks, hair product, some oranges. I realized that these were things I wanted, not things I needed. I guess the greens and oranges are needs for sustenance, but socks, hair stuff, or hangers are total luxuries. I didn’t feel some sort of guilt about getting this stuff, just an overwhelming sense of gratitude. I felt lucky.

I headed home and as I drove on the four-lane highway back to my town, a funeral procession approached in the oncoming direction. As is the custom here, a police cruiser led the way for a hearse and a stream of cars with headlights on mid-day. There is not a lot of traffic on this highway. Most days as I drive to and from work I see only a handful of cars. This was a Saturday before a holiday, so there were perhaps four cars visible ahead of me and five or six behind. All of us pulled over and stopped out of respect for the passing funeral. The older gentleman in the well-loved and well-worn pickup truck in front of me removed his baseball cap, smoothed back his hair, and bowed his head. The funeral procession rolled on and we started back up again to our various destinations.

It was such a sweet moment of tenderness among strangers and one that has been swimming in my head since. I felt even luckier. And I felt great love for the people mourning a loss and the other drivers who took a moment to respect that pain, that passing, that cycle.

Little moments should overwhelm us with love. Shit, man, EVERYTHING should overwhelm us with love.

Happiest of holidays to you all and here’s to new years and new seasons filled with love and strangers who aren’t strangers because they are us.

XO