I have contemplated responding to this several times. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a very private person, and that is for a myriad of reasons.
When I was 24, my wife left me. I was in the military, and I had two small children ages 9 months and 22 months. My wife left while we were living in Hawaii, and with the exception of one time when My kids were 11 and 12 years old, they have not seen their mother in that entire time.
This was one of the single largest defining moments in my adult life. I did everything I knew how to do at that time, in order to get her back. I then drank myself into oblivion for about 6 months while my parents took over the role of raising my children.
Somehow, I was able to pick up the pieces of that life and move on. It forced me to do many things, and many was the night I found myself after having put the kids to bed just looking at a blank television and wondering if this was all there was to life.
I spent the next ten years moving through life as a blind person would move through a brightly lit room. I felt everyone else around me navigating normally totally unaware of how lost I was. I made many mistakes, allowed my anger to control my destiny, and felt as if I were cast upon a sea to navigate without any fixed points in space.
There was a point to this, a point that I was unable to see during the time that it was occuring to me. These experiences, these successes and failures, were preparing me for a time that lay ahead. The only thing, I believe, that a person can do when faced with a life-changing event, is to evaluate what their role was in the event and learn from it. As the philosopher Santa Ana States "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it".
When I met Kandi, there was an instant moment of recognition between us. As if we were two souls, split at birth, coming together. The failures and experiences of my past prepared me for a moment that I had only dreamed would have been possible in my life. In her, I have found a friend, a companion, a lover, a confidante, a partner and a life-mate. She healed places in me that I did not know were even broken, and she has told me that I have done the same for her.
M. Scott Peck once wrote, "Life is Difficult, but once you accept that difficulty the task of living becomes that much easier". This is a paradigm that I have held onto for most of my adult life. I believe that this life is a gestation period, one in which that we are as infants, and one in which that our future is shrouded from us simply so that we may learn to navigate by faith, and in the belief of who we are and what we stand for.
I do not know what the right thing for you to do, and neither does anyone else. If you have done all that you can do to repair this, then you must live with what has happened and grow from it. If you have the ability to see what it was that failed at, and you believe that you have a responsibility in it, then you will be compelled to do something about it - either now, or at some later point in your life.
I believe that this will either be repaired, or it will prepare you for the time when you will meet your soul mate. As Robert Browning so eloquently states, "Grow old with me, the best is yet to be, The last of Life, for which the first was made".
He means simply, that what is to come, is merely a shadow of what has been, and all that has been, will prepare you for what is to come.
I will stop waxing philosophical. I know that most people see me as an analytical scientist, and perhaps that is because that is what life dictated I become in order to provide for my family. But inside, as is the case with most of us, I am really still the musician and poet that I was in my youth and age has only tempered the blade that was already foreseen in hands of the Master.
I wish you only the best,
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Excellence is not an act, but a habit - Aristotle