The first things we all know in life are blankets. Infants are wrapped in a blanket before even being wrapped in their mother’s arms. Men have been making them from animal skins since they first climbed down from the trees and felt the bitter chill of winter. They are such a part of human existence and human experience that we often neglect them, take them for granted. Others are fussed over, worried over, named and renamed in a thousand ways. Tyler said it, “Why do guys like us now what a duvee is? It’s just a blanket.” Others are lovingly crafted, sewn, quilted together piece by piece, some ornately constructed in rigid patterns, others wildly put together in crazy designs that please the eye and the heart.
Yet no matter how they are made, we use them for the same thing, most often. We wrap ourselves in them. Blankets were most of our first best friends, a security that we knew and believed in perhaps because, even more than our own mothers, it was the first thing we ever knew. All our lives they have a deep meaning that never leaves us. We are comfortable in our blankets, we snuggle in them, and wrap up in them when we are sick. We long for them after a hard day, we pull them lazily across ourselves when stretching out for a nap. We need them, in some ways more than we need anything else.
We have symbolic blankets as well, things we wrap ourselves in for warmth, protection, and comfort in emotional ways that we often do not realize. The warm blanket of love is the first that springs to mind, but there are others. The thick deep blanket of sadness is another, a dense wrapping of regret and bitter guilt that I often pull about myself, sink down into, wallow and snuggle in. I do it because it seems that it’s the only blanket that I have, and the bitter chill of the darkness outside can only be kept at bay if I keep it tightly wrapped around me. I huddle inside it, shivering despite this blankets heavy weight, its all-encompassing thickness. Its warmth isn’t real, but it feels, some days, like all the comfort there is in the world. I may walk around with my head up, as far as appearances go, but my soul is a withered and freezing plainsman, wrapped in a tight bearskin, aged and dying and utterly sad. I’d give anything for another blanket, a blanket of warmth and love, but there are none right now, I’ve foolishly thrown mine away, and I know of no one I can ask to give me another. I must search, find my own new blanket to wrap myself in, perhaps wrap another up with me one day, but I know, for now, I am alone in the bitter wind of the world with a blanket so heavy I can hardly bear it, a blanket that, despite its weight, bears me no warmth.
Or, perhaps the best way to shed this blanket of depression and guilt is this. I must learn to find the courage to live without a blanket for a while, to stand in the cold bitter wind and simply endure. I hope that I can.