A Day in the Life of Chaos

Malgosia... A long lost friend returns I have spent a lot of time and effort in my life looking for traces of my past lost in the fog of passing years.  I don't know why I do it, most people are just content to let it go.  Still, I suppose my personal philosophy that we are the compendium of our experiences has had something to do with it.  I think that every challenge, sadness and joy that life has thrown at us makes us who we are as a person.  I think in some ways I am constantly undergoing a state of personal re-evaluation as I look back and trace the scattered lines of my mind in an attempt to find sense and consistency that likely doesn't exist.  While this may be true, it doesn't stop me from trying. I think I also harbor the hope that in some ways those that have been formative or developmental in some way have felt the same about me.  That the feeling was mutual.  Sometimes I have peered behind the curtain of the past simply to say goodbye in a way I never di

Sometimes I think that the rings of a tree are the perfect metaphor for our lives.  When you look at a tree from the outside the only thing we notice is how fat or skinny it is.  How short or how tall.  Sadly as humans we are not Sequoias spanning the ages and when our tree is cut and ceases to live we find the story of its growth between each ring.  Some are pitifully narrow while others are wide signifying a lot of growth during one year of it's life.  I think if I was a tree a close analysis would find one short period spanning a single year from 1987 to 1988 where there was enormous growth. I lived in Vienna, Austria during this time attending a foreign study program. After extensive research into foreign study possibilities I had decided on the Institute of European Studies.  It seemed the perfect opportunity to combine living in Europe with cultural awakening, the forbidden cloak of Eastern European Communism and just being independent, far away from home.  Eager to pursue