Thinking to do.

He decided to go for a walk.  It was a decent enough day, slight chill in the air, but he’s not one to complain.  There appeared to be a nice tree on the hill in front of him, bathed in the color of the season.  It was a good as place as any, he decided.

He took a seat between the gnarled roots and looked out over the horizon.  Puffy, fluffy clouds drifted on by and a slight breeze nipped at the nose - lovely scene, really.  He came here to think.  Thinking is what he did best.  Focusing on those various problems of life, and trying to rationalize things so he could keep living in peace.  It’s not as easy as one would think, but he thought of it as a gift.  Most people couldn’t drift off in a world of intense thought, but he did with great ease.  The thing is he needed to do this.  He had so many things to go over, so many emotions to sort out, but looking at his face you’d never know that.  You’d just see that bored expression on his face that he wore about ninety percent of the time.  Stoic is what they call it, and he wore it well.

Of course, to do something well, you need to practice.  Thinking and hiding what he was thinking was what he did on an almost daily basis.  You get used to doing that when you spend a lot of your time alone.  It’s true that humans are social creatures, but like wolves, there are often some that seem to go off on their own.  He could keep a conversation going, thanks to all that thinking, but he was never a social butterfly and probably never would be one. 

Anyways, he had some thinking to do.  So he sat and weighed his problems on his mind, factored in the facts of life, and even added a bit of religion- not too much, he was having his own issues with that whole mess.  He worked these things around in his head like an artist with clay.  Eventually it was molded into something he could accept, or had to accept because you really can’t change some things. 

Content that he had figured everything out, or at least reconciled with it, he got up.  He turned to go back and entered the real world again.  Out of the mind and into the body.   Back to a world that isn’t very forgiving, but does contain those rare events of joy and like an addict you keep going to find your next fix.  It had been a long time since he got his last fix, and perhaps that’s what made him so bitter and determined to see this through. 

He also had friends he couldn’t abandon.  Just because he was lonely most of the time didn’t give him the right to make other people sad- he’s not a selfish bastard in that respect.  Trudging on and learning…that’s what life is about when you get down to the barest of bones.  With what you learn, you enrich someone else’s life.  He knew that, and he had a lot of enriching to do if he could find the right person, which only added to the list of reasons to keep on going. 

Yeah, he’s certainly got a lot of thinking to do.