Selected Entries from the "Searching Within" Journal
...containing the phrase "A Better Place to Be"

June 1982

A better place to be...

"Time, time, time: the beginning of a story. Truth, truth, truth: is a secret never told. Love, love, love: just another word. Peace, peace, peace: I don't believe it." Harry Chapin

This is HERE; NOW. Yet tomorrow, or some random day in the future, when I think back to this moment -- or any other distinct moments that I felt a specific feeling -- the thoughts are all going to be just shadows of thoughts; probably won't be able to really recapture...what it felt like: HERE and NOW.

It's tomorrow already: it was when I started.

Good feelings and bad feelings. Feelings about wondering what is right. Questions about knowing the differences between right and wrong.

Advice about present: "Don't worry about anything not directly concerned with now. Very few things concern people directly."

"Examine the pain: feel; to feel helps you to grow; growing is important."

"Find the true reality."

August 14, 1984

A long time ago, I heard a song that contained the lyrics: A better place to be. The lyrics mean to me, about looking for a place that would be better than the present. These words have become an expression of the feelings I have many times: wanting to find a place or future that is better or different from the one I have.

December 2, 1986

I have spent my entire life believing that a relationship would make everything alright. Now I realize it won't make me happy. I'm just as confused, lonely, and unhappy as I've always been. I don't know what to do. I don't know how to stop feeling bad. I've been carrying a lot of old resentments and feeling guilty, and wondering if I'm justified for my anger. Were things really that bad? Am I just creating my own problems inside myself?

Will it do any good to keep following after the sidetracks? If I already know they will not really solve the happiness problem, then why do I keep following them? Why bother grabbing after things like: if only I had a better job, a puppy, a farm, or could play the guitar, or write, or have better sex, or a better body, or to be more organized? Or to keep grabbing after ideas and stories in books I read? Besides, what if it's an excuse, for...I don't know what. How do I figure out which of these desires are ones worthy to follow? Which are really reaching for a true interest and which are excuses; blaming the desires because I can't or don't have them.

Is happiness measured in terms of accumulation of desires? Just a matter of getting what you want? And is there a correlation between intensity of desire and the rightness in pursing it? Does a person, should a person have an earth shaking desire, for vocation perhaps, before it's pursued, in order to prove it's magnitude, it's genuineness?

"I'll never have what I want; I'll never be what I want; and I don't know how to stop WANTING!"

Looking for a better place to be. I wonder if heaven is that place; I wonder if heaven exists.

Tuesday, November 1, 1988

...blocking the pain. Can't feel. Don't know how to let it out. Just hurts. What would make me feel good right now? An ice cream cone? Security of income, shelter? Hope?

After photography class, I was walking Chase by the lake. Chase running, playing and sniffing. Watching the ducks.

No mail. No escape. Just blank future; anything can be written there. A better place to be. Heaviness.