This is something I wrote many months ago and just ran across today. It's not meant to be create writing or anything of that sort. It just shares one of those little out-of-the-blue emotional kind of moments.


The Bath

Typing through the tears…. I just had my first bath in years. Oh, I’ve made
myself get in the tub and wash at least a couple times a week. No more then
that, of course because I’m getting older and like all my friends, my skin is drying out.

But, no, I’m talking about a real bath. A real bath is when you do it for you. Not because you should, not because you need to (to smell good for someone or just in general). And it doesn’t even have to be the kind of bath they always portray in the old movies: a big footed tub and lots of soap suds where you have to lift your leg up in the air as you’re shaving it. Yeah, right.

Infact, my bath lasted about 7 minutes, give or take. But it made me cry, and I had to write it down. In my 55 years in this present incarnation, I realized how little I’ve down for myself out of respect, let alone love. At first, the sadness overwhelmed me – it was almost like sharing Jesus’ compassion (a little of it anyway) when he looks at us, we who have become lost in our dramas here and don’t even realize how much we’ve taken, how much we’ve given and how much we’ve endured because we thought we had to. There’s the rub: all of this just to survive. For what?

I should probably go back to the beginning of my story to explain how I got
here and why I spent all this time being so hard on myself. But I imagine the
details don’t matter – it’s probably everyone’s story. The form might be
different, but the content is the same. If we’re going to love others, we must
also love ourselves.