battling windmills...
Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen. ~ John le Carre
This is why D is still in my life: because he went with me into very lonely places and he’s the only other one who actually knows…
I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.
~Antonio Porchia, Italian Poet
I was taking a Masters’ course when I discovered a very interesting theory about self-identification. For the life of me, I can’t remember the theory’s name but the gist of the theory is that when a person is given a gift that he/she never would have gotten for him/herself, that person has two choices: accept the gift and alter his/her personality to integrate that gift into it or reject the gift and make no personality changes. (And if any one recognizes this theory, please let me know its proper title)
Each person in the class was asked to cite a specific example of this happen, and for most of the class, they spoke about a time they received a gift and integrated it into their lives. When my turn came, I couldn’t think of an example of that type. Instead, I remembered a gift from an Ex. He had bought me a beautiful gold chain, very elegant. Some how, though, he had missed that I never wore gold and so it laid in a drawer for years, never worn. I saw the gift, knew it was purchased with the sweetest of intentions and could not integrate it into my self-identification.
I have been thinking a lot about this integration process over the last few days. I made a choice and took an action that challenged my philosophy when it shouldn’t have. Solving this conundrum was extraordinarily difficult for me because it was several layers down under some irrelevant distractors. Now that I’ve found it, I’ve been able to examine it and am looking for a way to weave it into the tapestry which is my life.
But it’s started me thinking about why it was so hard. I was shocked by how deeply devastating this misunderstanding was for me. Several times in my life, I’ve reevaluated and reworked my personal philosophy because I have been confronted by inconsistencies in my own philosophy, but this time was truly the hardest.
As I mulled this thought, I touched on the adaptability of children, who seem able take in so much change so seamlessly. The answer I’ve come up with is that most children don’t have a well developed personal philosophy. They’re still sponges. So when they encounter a difficult idea they’ve never been exposed to, they’ll do one of two things: examine it to see if it’s worth their time or dismiss it out of hand. In this, they are able to deal with a great many situations that adults struggle with deeply.
There are days I would love to have that childlike innocence, but I also realize that it would mean having less of a personal philosophy. So, I will be content to have my personal philosophy and focus on reconciling this recent inconsistency instead.
~CaS
Expectations by Tofu Snofu
© All rights reserved by Tofu Snofu
Himalayas by flashback_by
© All rights reserved by flashback_by
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
~ Albert Einstein.
I’m having difficulty writing of late. My mind is breaking because I’ve struggled to understand a choice I made 5 months ago. My choice was an acceptable one for me. It was one I had argued for multiple times in my life on behalf of others. My choice made sense for me. I can list out all the reasons I made the choice. It had no value attached. I wasn’t making a “good” choice or a “bad” choice. Nor was I doing a “good” or “bad” thing. I was just doing what I could to live my life. I don’t regret the choice; I just can’t get away from the after effects.
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
~ Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
On Monday, while walking the aisles of Wal Mart, I had a very odd thought: what if the choice wasn’t the problem? What if my expectations of the choice were the problem?
And that had a ring of truth to it. Because very honestly, most of how we perceive the world is through reaction to expectations. When we are happy about something, it is because it went the way we expected it to or in a way that was better than we expected it to. When we are upset about something, it is more often because that thing failed to meet our expectations or went an unexpectedly bad way.
So, when you are having difficulty understanding your attitude, reexamine your expectations. You may be able to unmake chains of irons or thorns.
~CaS
365 #23 theme~expectations by Lucky Kiona
© All rights reserved by Lucky Kiona
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be monsters!
Capt Barbossa
Most people have relationships on the map. Family ties, friendships, co-workers, school mates. Most people can have these relationship without going off the edge of the map; they are safe relationships. However, when it comes to intimate relationships, it is easy to go off the map. When we get intimately involved with someone off the edge of the map, we wake up the things that live out there too. Anger, Jealousy, Envy, Passion. Things we don’t deal with daily. Things that can seem like monsters when we are alone with them.
Off the edge of the map often requires the support of the other whom we have strayed with. We’re safe with them. We feel we can deal with the possible damage these monsters may reek when that person is with us. So we ignore the boundaries and frolick in the land beyond boarders. We may even play with the creatures we find out there. If we’ve found the right playmate, we may be able to stay out beyond the edge of the map indefinitely.
But for most of us, we don’t find that playmate the first time or many of the times we cross that boundary. And when we lose that person, off the edge of the map becomes a dangerous place for us. Those creatures we may have played with become the monsters they are capable of being and alone, we no longer have the ability to tame them.
This is why, when intimate relationships end, they rarely flow into friendships. Because, until all parties involved can deal with those creatures, off the edge of the map is dangerous place to be. Because it requires special effort to tame the monsters; it requires good communication between those who woke the monsters in the first place. It requires awareness of the edges and the consequences of wandering beyond them. And most who leave intimate relationships don’t see value in that endeavor. Rather, they would prefer to ignore those creatures and focus on the things on the map. Easier to do that. Less work to do that.
Occasionally, though, we are offered the opportunity to flow from intimates to friends. Then we must face those monsters together and learn the boundaries of the map. That is the challenge. Are you up for it?
~CaS
You said “please” and asked me to set my wants aside. I could do nothing else for you. That is the frustration of want for me.
The curse of wanting is that you don’t always get what you want. So powerful an idea that the Rolling Stones put it to music. Mich Jagger and Keith Richards reassure us, though, that even if we can’t get what we want, we get what we need.
This last weekend, D and I went to a jazz fest in the Netherlands. 4 and half hours in the car is a lot of time to talk, and me being who I am, managed to finally get D into a philosophical discussion. It, of course, centered around his statement that everything happens for a reason. And that of course is a euphamism for getting what you need from life.
I disagree with everything happening for a reason. I don’t believe life gives us what we need. I don’t like the cliche that you can make lemonade when life gives you lemons. Not because I don’t like lemonade but because I don’t necessarily need lemonade when life gives me lemons. Sometimes I need beer and lemons aren’t very good for making beer, even citrus beer.
Life gives us events, people, circumstances. We have very little control over what life does give us or takes from us. Why it gives us those things is random, more random than most of us are comfortable with. But any purpose that comes from those “gifts” is our own making. Some people, when they get lemons, don’t make lemonade but instead carve beautiful swans into the fruit. Some people use those lemons to cover the flavor of tap water. Some people look at it and go “that’s not what I wanted” and throw the lemon and its potential away. When life gives us lemons, we chose what to make of them.
The discussion ended when D brought up Chose Your Own Adventure books. It’s part of his philosophy on life as it is part of my own. Our views seem to differ slightly though on how it actually applies to life. He is in favor of everything happening for a reason. He seems to think that the answers will be there when he picks the next page. And that is where we disagree. Because I don’t believe the answers will be there on the chosen page. I believe that I get a blank page, and the choices I made to get to that blank page will help ME fill it.
My answer to him is this: My book is the universe and the choices are unlimited. Nothing is preordained. Nothing is fated. That can seem bleak to some, I know, but to me, it’s an amazing kaleidoscope of opportunity and chance. We make our own life and if we’re aware of that, we can do some amazing things. I think adding an element of fate, of happening for a reason, undermines the beauty of what we create out of life.
The discussion ended because I couldn’t continue without risking loosing more of myself to him, a very precarious situation for me. I look for choices that have more of him in my life and risk what hell I may pay for that later. Those are my choices and I willing take on those blank pages.
~CaS
I am thankful for those just-in-time things that you run across just when you think you can’t make it any further, oases in the desert that is occasionally life.
Two days ago, I got a note from docrivs about my 43 Things post A “D” Shaped Impression in My Life. Docrivs said some very nice things to me, but the really important thing was that he brought me back to that post and reminded me of my own philosophies. Docrivs said this:
“that ‘d-shaped impression’ may always be a part of you, and that’s not necessarily such a bad thing. we are all shaped by our experiences, including our feelings, thoughts, and attitudes. they are neither good nor bad in and of themselves. it’s what we do with our experiences and the ways in which they do their work that makes us what we are.”
My thanks again to docrivs for reminding me how important it is just to experience life.
That night I reread my old posts here, rediscovering my life over the last year. And I was shocked. It was like looking at a tapestry just off the loom after having concentrated so hard on the individual pieces while weaving. I saw a masterful reflection of my philosophy and discovered that I have a couple of overarching themes that mark what I write about. The first: human connectivity and how much value I place on the strength of it. The second: consideration for others. Reading thru my posts is like listening to a piece of music, you don’t necessarily notice the repeating patterns at first. You hear the melody and are drawn along the first time. Then you listen a second and third time. All of a sudden, you start to pick up the harmony. And then finally, you have that aha! moment where you see it, not as a group of individual thoughts, but an overarching symphony.
I have struggled of late to post personal, intimate things here. I even pulled back a post for the first time earlier this week. My life has always been chaos; it is my true nature. To capture even small pieces of it and put that down requires an intense effort. To share it with other, even anonymously, requires immense trust. I have had a dearth of both in my life of late. It has called into question my lack of boundaries and my ability to carry on unconventional relationships.
I have fallen in love with sculpture here in Europe. They remind of how life is, deep with impact; not two-dimensional like paintings. You have to walk all the way around a statue to appreciate the true artistry that it represents. Because no matter how amazing the initial images the statue presents you with, you’ll still be rendered breathless when you circle round. You gain a deeper understanding of it beauty and intricacy. A reminder to experience life in all its dimensions.
~CaS
It’s important to be aware of what we say to others and the when and where we say those things. Context matters. Audience matter.
Luke: Why didn’t you tell me? You told me Vader betrayed and murdered my father.
Obi-Wan: Your father… was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force. He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker and *became* Darth Vader. When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed. So what I told you was true… from a certain point of view.
Luke: A certain point of view?
Obi-Wan: Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.
Tonight D and I had a huge fight. It was odd that we fought having enjoyed some other good moments during the day to include lunch. It was a fight over semantics, his use of the word “date” in a group of shared acquaintances. It left me in an awkward place for nearly 2 hours, full of anger, hurt and confusion.
It was hard because I find D to be intelligent enough and sophisticated enough to understand that using “date” in that environment was a subtle jibe at our change in status, used consciously or not. I cannot say if I have overestimated D’s emotional intelligence or that I expect too much from him. I only know that it hurt me, so I called him on it and pulled no punches.
After the poison was let, we had a good discussion about how words can be used. Included was how words can be used to control perception without lying, as Obi-Wan did with Luke. How often do we craft our words to hide the truth? To avoid the awkward situation? To make it so others can accept and deal with our frame of reference? Haven’t we all at one time or another?
Just so it’s clear, D and I are having fun together. That is the best way to describe it. Unfortunately not all our interactions are fun but the majority are. Don’t label us as lovers, although that might be appropriate. Don’t say we’re involved or dating, although it may make sense to you. Any conventional label you can think of, throw it out. It doesn’t apply. If you want to label us as anything, “Friends” is as close as you can get, but that falls far short…
The worst hurt of the night for me was probably believing that D had started a conventional relationship. I cherish the unconventional tenor of what goes on between me and D. It works well and suits me. That he would chose a conventional relationship and do so without warning me felt like a betrayal. I’m glad to be wrong on that count.
~CaS
Isolation by Katherine Elizabeth
© All rights reserved by Katherine Elizabeth
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Loneliness from Wikipedia
Loneliness is a feeling where people experience a powerful surge of emptiness and solitude. Loneliness is more than the feeling of wanting company or wanting to do something with another person. Some one who is lonely may find it hard to form human contact … Loneliness does not require aloneness and is often experienced even in crowded places. It can be described as the absence of identification, understanding or compassion.
Social Isolation from Wikipedia
The pervasive withdrawal or avoidance of social contact or communication.
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Isolation by misu/Mikhail Palinchak
© All rights reserved by misu/Mikhail Palinchak
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I am afraid of being left behind, of not being wanted. It wraps like bands of steel around my chest and makes it difficult to breathe, to live. It makes me hold too tight to those friends I have and takes away the trust I hold in my own ability to make and keep friends. I am searching for a way to conquer this fear so that it won’t dominate my whole life as it has in the past.
Not having many friends in my life, I have become a student of human relations. Humans are social creatures. We come from social roots. I have watched the importance of connectivity in the happiness and sadness of others. I think we often underestimate the importance of these relationships on our lives.
Some times, a story comes to our attention that reflects something critical going on in our lives. Recently for me that was “Lars and the Real Girl”. It is a movie about the importance of human connections and how those connections affect the quality of our lives. This was an amazing movie about a community joining forces to help one of their own rejoin society. It is a story of how love and trust of others can restore a person when he or she is lost in the wilderness of life.
It is the story of a man who has lost the ability to live among others. He can no longer communicate what he needs to those closest to him. His past haunts him: his mother died while delivering him into the world and his life has been defined by it. His sister-in-law, whom he loves deeply, is now pregnant and he is deeply disturbed by this. He has no friends to turn to. He has no love to hold him. He is lonely and socially isolated and desperately wanting not to be.
In his desperate quest to escape, Lars finds a unique and unusual solution to his problem. He invents some one to love him and brings her to life as best he can. Lars orders a life-like blow up doll and builds a story around her. It shows just how desperate he is to find an outlet for his misery. This solution has a huge potential to backfire on him. It relies greatly on those around him buying into what he’s doing, on them supporting his needs without necessarily understanding them. It has the potential of putting him in a mental institution.
What unfolds is the true beauty of humanity. Not only does his community support him, they do so with such honesty and good nature. Lars’ friends and family take Bianca, the doll, into their lives, giving her more life than Lars could do alone and reflecting the power community has in the lives of its members.
Bianca also provides Lars an tabula rosa with which he can explore his isolation and learn to reconnect with humanity. He is able to project his fears and doubts onto her without hurting her and make up the responses he needs from her to find healing in himself. Bianca is a “safe” outlet for all the confusing feelings Lars has always lived with. In the end, she helps him move out of the social isolation that has defined his life and into the world of the living.
In watching this movie, one of the thoughts that occurred to me was that we often don’t get to say what’s in our hearts. We hold back, censor those things, afraid of what the truth might actually mean. We fear being misunderstood and so we repress the difficult things that have happened to us in our lives, dark moments that haunt us. But those are the moments we most need our support network and if we can’t have them, can’t have the outlet, it will likely drive us mad. The same may be true if we can’t find the proper outlet either.
“Lars and the Real Girl” is a story of withholding social judgment and allowing necessary outlets. It is about restoring connections necessary to live a connected, healthy life.
I hope that you have the necessary connections for a happy and rewarding life.
~ CaS
Lars and the Real Girl Official Site
A fox turned away from the road as I drove home tonight. A flash of dark orange fur and a thick tail caught my eye as my headlights slid along the tree line. That is part of my life now, the exotic wildlife you never see in the US. It’s a part of the newness and potential my life holds.
But the past haunts me too. I am struggling with being alone. B told me last summer as I struggled with the question of whether to divorce J that I’m a person who needs to have some one in my life. I didn’t discount what he said. He sees me quite clearly. I just want it not to be true.
But that doesn’t seem to be the case. I don’t know what it’s like to have a lot of friends. I have difficulty making them and difficulty keeping them. I haven’t had many in my life. And when I get them, I doubt my worth to keep them. I think that my lovers and significant others have been, in part, an attempt to fill that void. Sex and love can tie a person to you rather tightly. What better way to ensure you never have to do anything alone than to add a person to your life who wants to be with you all the time?
This question circles my mind right now because I’m adjusting to the new way D fits into my life. In part, I wanted him in my life because of his circle of friends. He was introducing me to new people I really liked being around. People of like mind who I could talk to. People of similar interest who I could do stuff with. People I just don’t know how to find on my own. So even though I want the change between us, I also want the relationship to stay the same so I can have access to those people and learn from him.
Some of the ways I judge my success at making friends is thru phone calls and e-mails. For a period of several years,I went without a cell phone for a long time because J was the only person who called me and that wasn’t so often that we needed cell phones for it. I have a cell phone now. It doesn’t ring much. It does ring and it’s not always the same person calling. I also look at my e-mail and Facebook responses. I get enough. The hard part for me is that it won’t ever really be enough. I will always want more to validate my friendships. Because the popular kid is always getting called, always has remarks on Facebook, always has e-mails. I know this isn’t entirely realistic but I can’t help myself.
So I sit here in the middle of the night, wrapped in a fuzzy blanket, wishing there were some one else here so I wouldn’t feel so scared and lonely.
~CaS
We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.
~ Anais Nin
Photo by Kudra7
© All rights reserved by Kudra7
I had a rough Saturday night two weeks ago. In fact, from the 27th of March until just this Sunday, I was having a hellish go of things. A distance grew between D and I. I saw the change immediately. His whole demeanor changed. However, no one else noticed. In fact, unless we tell people that our status has changed, they still don’t notice. They don’t notice we don’t kiss in public or hold hands any more. And that got me to thinking about how we perceive our world.
Another item that stirred these ideas in me is OMO’s article on Susan Boyle, the British singer who is making news due to her spectacular voice and her feisty attitude.
She does have an amazing voice, beautifully haunting. She can put amazing feeling and deep emotion into her singing. Yet, her outside looks don’t match her inside talents. So we are shocked when she sings. We are caught of guard by the incongruous nature of such a sublime voice coming from one so homely. However, our mis-perceptions heighten our enjoyment of Susan’s voice. Would we have enjoyed it as much if it came from Miss America, from a supermodel or would it have been expected? But how long and what exactly did it take for us to see thru that misconception? And what did we miss out on in the mean time?
These things made me think about how often we don’t actually see the world around us. We see discrete moments of time and do our best to interpret that. We live life as a series of photographs.
Photo by Alk3
© All rights reserved by Alk3
And photographs can be misleading. You see I have been looking closely at the recent photographs of D and our recent trips. D broke his ribs skiing on our last trip. He hurt like hell the whole time. In all the pics, though, he is smiling. Every now and again, you see him with his hand over his ribs, but always there’s the smile so perhaps he’s laughing hard and not trying to hold in the pain. There’s a photo of our hands joined across the width of the table. I don’t remember the moment. It looks tender in the pic. It’s one of the few times we touched during the night and some one happened to have the camera pointed at our hands at just the right moment.
The truth is that we never really see the truth. We only know what appears thru the rose colored glasses. We make decisions and interact with people based on how our world looks to us. Given that, it’s amazing how we form complex and beautiful relationships out of those snapshots in time.
Photo by vtpeacenik
© All rights reserved by vtpeacenik
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Don’t always trust what you see. Listen to your world.
Don’t always trust what you hear. Touch your world.
Don’t always trust what you touch. Smell and taste your world.
Don’t always trust what you smell and taste. Look around you.
Life is a synthesis of experiences. If you ever find yourself relying on one sense to the exclusion of all else, reexamine your world. You may be missing something beautiful.
~CaS
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