"A being of the nature of man, endowed with the same faculties, but with a longer measure of existence, would cast down a smile of pity and contempt on the crimes and follies of human ambition, so eager, in a narrow span, to grasp at a precarious and short-lived enjoyment. it is thus that the experience of history exalts and enlarges the horizon of our intellectual view. In a composition of some days, in a perusal of some hours, six hundred years have rolled away, and the duration of a life or reign is contracted to a fleeting moment: The grave is ever beside the throne; the success of a criminal is almost instantly followed by the loss of his prize; and our immortal reason survives and disdains the sixty phantoms of kings who have passed before our eyes, and faintly dwell in our remembrance."

                   - Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 48

I highly recommend the Gibbon-O-Matic. Just keep reading and hitting Reload.

We always have our choice of realities to live in, and I find that nowhere are those choices more clear-cut than at the end of a relationship. In the endless search for an explanation, we develop only a handful of realities that answer enough questions to satisfy. We refine, resolve, fine-tune. Who changed? Who didn't? Some of these realities are clearly unhealthy, like the one where you did everything wrong and that's what drove off the other person. The one where the other person is crazy or cold-hearted isn't so great, either. (The one where she's kinda messed up but there was a massive feedback cycle of emotional abuse kinda sucks, but still is the only way to make sense of one relationship.) The problem is not that these aren't sufficient, but they're not true...I guess explaining the situation isn't entirely the goal; part of the underlying purpose, for me, is always to figure out how I went from being someone special to being just another person, albeit with some added history. Maybe you don't have my need to feel special and so have other problems instead...I wonder what's left of feelings once the ego falls away.

Of course I can change reality by changing how I am in it, and that's really the better plan. Which, you know. Work in progress.

Lots of good aikido today. More good aikido tomorrow. Mmm, aikido.