Afterward...

Perhaps that last post needed a bit of prologue, if nothing else to make clear what it was not. I'm fine, really, and no-one need worry. I titled the post "Consolatio" because that is what I found in it: comfort. Not the hot chocolate in front of a cozy hearth kind of comfort, of course--it was more like battlefield comfort, which comes from knowing that, come the end, we will not have endured in vain. (Even that is far too grand, really: my doubts and fears are just another mundane skirmish in the Great War, with no ground lost and only a few bruises to show for it.)

As I said at the beginning of the post, what happened was small--small enough that I saw the bit of blue funk I felt afterward was a gross over-reaction. Sometimes that's what it takes for me: a moment in which I see my emotions are disproportionate to my situation, and thereby discover that my situation is not their real source. My post was a meditation on that discovery. It was very personal, and also painfully real; but I posted it because I thought I might not be alone in these feelings. Perhaps others have felt them too, and would profit from having words to frame them.

It was not my intention to worry anyone. Instead, I wanted only to be honest before others, to show them the things I learned in my weakness. Recall the moment in the Fellowship of the Ring when Gandalf watched Frodo recovering from his wound:

He is not half through yet, and to what he will come in the end not even Elrond can foretell. Not to evil, I think. He may become like a glass filled with a clear light for eyes to see that can.

That is what I desire to be like--but I am not half through yet...