“I did it all. I listened to the voices, I did what they told me, and not once did I say ‘what’s in it for me?’”
“What are you saying, Ray?”
"I’m saying, what’s in it for me?”
This is a conversation Ray Kinsella has with “Shoeless,” Joe Jackson, in the film Field of Dreams I won’t go into the details except to say Ray is distraught he has not been invited to venture out into the cornfield with the baseball team, but Terence Mann has. This exchange has been profound for me, and it ties into the quotation I posted earlier from Sling Blade in that many times my expectations of how events may unfold are often not even close to how they transpire. I have made a lot of progress in every area of the recovery, including having to refamiliarize myself with lessons I had learned as an adolescent (for example, not reading into the subtext of an unreturned email). Sometimes, however, it’s more difficult to keep in perspective the importance of doing something which may or may not have obvious value to it with regard to the return. However, I will continue to emulate Thoreau with a quotation from his essay “Walking.” “So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.”