A.R. Williams's Blog, page 24

On Unpopular Love

Oprah ruined love.  Hallmark delivered several death blows, but Oprah (and through her, Dr. Phil) killed it.

Love yourself.  It’s a pop psychology mantra that we hear everywhere.  But who can really qualify what that means?  It’s a concept that’s been broken down into 15-second sound bites for commercials.  “Next on Tyra/Oprah/Dr. Phil…  Love yourself in time for dinner.”

But our whole concept of love is completely fucked up.  We think it is what we see on TV or read about in trashy romance novels.  A proud broken man, a woman with a secret.  They fall in love but their differences tear them apart.  All until the man realizes that he doesn’t have to be broken any more and the woman shares her secret and then they stay married and have loads of babies and wedded bliss.

We think we can do the hard stuff once and be done with it.  You can’t.  The hard stuff has to be done over and over and over again.  It’s like going to the gym.  Or staying away from the FroYo.

We think love is roses and chocolate and bubble baths and sunset walks on the beach and Paris and diamond rings.  And all of these ideas came from people who wanted to sell us shit.  People that wanted our money in exchange for the accessories that they told us were associated with love.  We gave up the real thing for the “as seen on TV” version.

So now we’re supposed to love ourselves.  With the diamond rings for our right hands since the left hand is reserved for Prince Charming?  Let’s face it, some of us take the TV version of “love yourself” a little too far.  It’s called narcissism, and I promise you, it doesn’t make for good partnerships.  All this love yourself nonsense starts to look like it belongs nestled up to our notions of “deserve.”  We know how I feel about that, and if you don’t, I’ll summarize: deserve is the wrong damn question.

Love yourself is not about looking yourself in the mirror deeply and saying “I love myself” over and over again.  It isn’t about justifying a Mercedes Benz.  It isn’t about justifying a new piece of jewelry, or a new house, or a long vacation.  It isn’t approving of everything about yourself unconditionally.  Loving yourself along the lines of Hallmark and Oprah hasn’t gotten us very far.

Let me tell you what I know about love.

Love sees clearly.  Even more important, love is willing to look.  Love doesn’t gloss over faults or pretend that they don’t exist.  Love is willing to acknowledge the parts that are ugly and selfish and mean-spirited and arrogant and lazy and fragile.  Love sees all of those things and doesn’t flinch and doesn’t condemn.

Love gets out of the way of the consequences.  Love doesn’t deprive the beloved of the benefit of their failures.  Love lets the beloved fail because any meaningful success is nourished by the shit that didn’t work.

Love doesn’t have the answers; love sits with you while you ask the questions.

Love doesn’t save you; it stands next to you as you save yourself.

Love is pragmatic.  It acknowledges reality and adjusts accordingly.  It is more interested in what works than it is in being right or preserving its ego or defending its opinions.

Love takes the long view.  It looks at the aggregate, not the last five minutes.

Love is supple.  Flexible.  Adaptable.  Resilient.  It can be okay in a variety of situations.  It might grumble a little, but it will find a way to make it work.  It’s strong that way.

Love is loyalty.  It is trusting someone even when you don’t understand what’s happening or why.  It is speaking kindly of someone to the external world when you really want to smack them in the face.  It’s keeping the personal between you and the beloved.  It believes in someone when the evidence points in other direction.  It acknowledges their imperfections even as it acknowledges that your place is next to this flawed individual.  Hell, it might find those flaws endearing in the right light.

Love shows up.

Love finds reasons to laugh, even on the most miserable of days.  Gallows humor counts, and if you’re going to go down, you might as well go down laughing.

So what does it mean to love yourself?  Own everything, your good and bad qualities equally.  Acknowledge that perfect isn’t possible, but that trying is well within your capacity.  Have a sense of humor, risk failure, show up relentlessly, tell yourself the truth, do what you can from where you are, and forgive yourself for being a bloody idiot.  Because we’re all bloody idiots in one way or another.

If you can do that for someone else, you can do it for yourself.  And if you can do it for yourself, you can do it for someone else.

Today’s Twitter Quote

The abyss is lovely, dark, and deep, but I have chasms to leap, and bridges to burn before I sleep.  –@tinynietzsche

Neutrality / Ambivalence

I’ve hinted around neutrality before.  A friend in St. Louis first recommended that, when in conversation with the Universe, I might ask that my neutrality be expanded.  As a not naturally neutral kind of person, this was a brand new thought and a relief both.  Ah, blessed neutrality.  The precursor for things like understanding, clarity, observation, and acceptance.  A critical building block for things like compassion.  A requirement for choosing your reaction instead of just succumbing to your ego-centric emotional response.

Neutrality is about breathing.  The absence of expectations.  For someone who is generally anything but neutral, it’s like cold water on a blistering hot day.   It is the epitome of nirvana.

I have not been feeling much neutrality as of late.  Actually, ever since the move.  Prior to the horrible evening of watching box after box enter my roommate’s house, I was doing pretty good.  I’d been gifted with certainty and neutrality and I was riding out the attendant complications and ramifications of my choices with equanimity.

Then I moved.

Neutrality vanished.  My reasoned approach abandoned me and I said some things that I stand behind, but probably weren’t helpful at that particular juncture.   And all of that agitation and frustration and impatience stuck.

Until the past couple of weeks,  when neutrality’s cousin showed up instead.  I now have ambivalence.  While neutrality and clarity can co-exist quite happily, ambivalence and clarity want nothing to do with each other.  Ambivalence is a fan of napping.  Sleeping late, staying up late, watching stupid crap on TV, these are all the purview of ambivalence.

When compared to agitation and indigestion, ambivalence is a blessing.  Neutrality is better, at least when it comes to waking up in the morning…  But if ambivalence is all I get for the moment, I think I’ll not complain.

Time

One of my favorite twitter quotes goes like this:

Loyalty is choosing to stay when you believe you should leave. Faith is choosing to believe that you should stay.  -Ram Sundaram

Of course there is more to faith than simply believing you should stay.  (Keep in mind that anyone who knows me knows that when I use the word faith, it has nothing to do with the Christian connotations of the word, being decidedly heathen in my spiritual outlook.)  Faith is kind of meaningless in the glamorized conversational sense.  As stated elsewhere, conviction is easy when you’re talking about it; the more difficult path is living it without an audience.  Perhaps this explains the relentless need to proselytize.   Actually living out what you proclaim is so much more difficult than the proclaiming.  Certainty is legion for as long as your mouth is open.

But I digress.

Time is the problem.

The space between the faith-born certainty and its proof fills with doubt.  Doubt and competing priorities.  Options, fears, confusion, uncertainty.

If I could decide what time means, the right scale by which to assess its relevance, then perhaps the rest of the calculus would fall into place.

On one hand, both inside and outside Christianity, we get reminded that G-d’s time is not the same as ours.  (Substitute universe or source for G-d if you are so inclined.)  And this makes sense.  Look at it from an evolutionary standpoint.  We are specks of dust, if that.  The years we count in are meaningless.  What can be accomplished in one lifetime is to the universe what one ant can get done in a single day to us.  What difference does another day, another year make?  These measures are nothing in the big picture.  And in this framework, what are you to do but carry on and trust that the universe will deliver the right thing in the right time.

This schema goes along with the comforting idea that you’re doing exactly what you need to be doing right where you are, which is comforting when you always feel like you haven’t quite done enough, pushed yourself hard enough, produced enough.

On the other hand, there’s the feeling that you are always the star of your own movie.  In which case every second counts and there’s no such thing as being content letting things play out as they will.  Worst case scenario, the gaps between should be handled with a video montage and a good song that covers the gaps where faith (or lack thereof) is in play.

I fear both are true, depending on where you stand.  In which case it becomes apparent that the only clear answer is that I think too much.  So I careen from one stance to the other, with my ego stating unequivocally that it is time to get this show on the road and the part of me that meddles in faith saying that there’s nothing to worry about, that whatever it is is exactly what it needs to be and that, when the time is right, it will become something else entirely – something meant to fit the time and the space allocated.

Which is no answer at all.

 

Decisions

“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Somewhere around October of 2011, I decided I was done doing temporary.  Almost, maybe, works for now, will do in a pinch, I’ve got nothing better to do, why not, it’s better than nothing, at least I’ll have something to write about…  I decided all of those were no longer options for me.

And the universe has been laughing at me ever since.  I’ve moved twice since that declaration, the second move being less settled than I could have ever imagined at the time that I made this brash assertion to the ether.  The permanent love that dropped into my lap has proven theoretical by any practical or experiential measure.

One of my 3 go-to books for navigating my emotional state with some semblance of balance* says to listen to the songs that arrive unbidden in your head as they are a means through which your intuition speaks.  In my head, I hear misinterpreted lyrics from Jonatha Brooke.

In my dream it’s all a test that I take to find myself.  

I still believe in it, the power that accompanies a decision, even though the past two years haven’t exactly conformed the supposition.  In fact, the past two years have provided more evidence towards a laughing, capricious universe that looks at any decisions made by me and says “ha!  really?  that’s how you think it’s going to be?  well, watch this…”

Which leaves me exactly nowhere.  I like to have some sort of a conclusion when I sit down to write a post, but today I’ve got nothing of the sort.  Just that, in spite of all evidence being to the contrary, I believe in the power of a decision.

And I’m still officially unavailable for temporary.

*The balance book list is:

Working on yourself doesn’t work
The Four Agreements
No Enemies Within

 

 

A Better Mousetrap

There is a mouse in the house.  He’s been feasting on those psudo-logs you buy at the grocery store when you have a fireplace that you don’t really use until you have a fantasy about cuddling up in front of the fire and then you go buy some and they end up hanging around the fireplace for months.  He’s been leaving poopy gifts in the pots and pans.

My roommate swears that, if she sees said mouse, she is selling the house.

Me, I’d be a lot more worried about cockroaches.

We now have the old fashioned traps tucked behind stuff, but no decisive snaps indicating that the jaws of death have closed on Mr. Mouse and, in a fraction of a second, broken his neck.  The roommate doesn’t particularly want to kill this mouse, but she also doesn’t want to sell the house.  Between the two, the selling of the house is the far more odious prospect.  And so Mr. Mouse must die.

But now comes the question of who is going to empty the trap, assuming Mr. Mouse has a dying wish for peanut butter.  She has refused.  She doesn’t want to see a dead mouse or handle said dead mouse.

Which has interacted oddly with recent news that my Mother’s cancer is not going to be the slight annoyance that we had been lead to believe, and that she may in fact have a much more finite life expectancy than previously thought.  Assuming the proverbial bus doesn’t add an element of unpredictability to this equation.

I find the idea of her body being absent much more fathomable than the idea that her experience and interactions will disappear.  Somehow it is easier to wrap your mind around not having a body than not having a perspective.

There’s something there in the transition there, perhaps for the mouse and my mother, that indefinite state between where you are not quite cut lose from your body just yet but the metaphorical mousetrap is baited and set.  It isn’t being dead, it’s being almost dead that is concerning.  From almost dead to the logistics that happen when a body is no longer animated by it’s wants and opinions.   Everything before and after that is manageable, it’s just the space between the trap being set and the body being returned to carbon that seems to be uneasy for those of us with a mouse problem and devastating for those of us with a cancer problem.

what they don’t tell you…

It isn’t like you’d listen even if someone tried, not when you’re 16 and so certain that there are right answers and wrong answers and you are supremely confident of your ability to differentiate between the two.

Now, at the grand old age of 35, I am slowly giving in to the reality that there are only costs and consequences.  Right and wrong are only available in the extremes: hurting things that are less powerful than you, stealing, drive by shootings.  Most of our choices don’t fall into those categories.  Most of our choices are between decaf and regular, dinner out or dinner in.  Those choices aren’t particularly problematic either.  I mean really, beyond the fact that our days are like slips of rice paper – inconsequential until taken in aggregate – the hundreds of choices we make every day don’t matter.

But between the extreme and the inconsequential, there are choices about love and relationships, about who we’re going to be to the people we meet and how we’re going to handle ourselves.  And the “right” answer to those questions, to what loyalty looks like in practice, to how compassion is to be put into play, to how far you go or what you owe to another person, those answers evolve.  Sometimes by the second.  Opinions on the subject are multiple, but the consequences, those are yours and yours alone.   And maybe the consequences are not as permanent as a murder, but words are permanent for as long as they are remembered.  What you do matters, and it matters profoundly.

I’ve been vacillating.  Wildly.  Silently.  I’ve given up several times a day over the past week, but it always comes back to this, to the things that seems true beyond the facts of the matter.   Giving up on a friend is a sad choice of last resort.  Shouldn’t there be someone for everyone?  Someone that believes positive outcomes are possible and will stand without judgement as a witness, as a “withness,” not to do the work for the person in question, but in quiet support of that work?  How can you look at someone within the boundaries of non-psychotic/sociopathic humanity and say that they deserve to be left to rot in their own limitations? How do you just give up on someone?  It doesn’t compute.

Still, its one thing to think it through, to arrive at a conclusion that has the resonance of  truth and agree with yourself.  This is how it should be.  It is quite another to live it.

I’ve been on the down side of this circle.  The people who let me work it out for myself and maintained a sort of bland attitude about how I wouldn’t always be exactly where I was and that I’d get back to good in my own way in my own time…  their conviction that it would get better in combination with their non-judgement of when or how I got there…  what a relief.  Both the company and the expectation-free faith (if there is such a thing.)

And why should I not be that for someone else?  I can’t think of a good reason…

Who Switched The Price Tags?

Reblogged from Scott Williams:

Tony Campolo tells the story of a group of criminals who break into a department store but don't steal anything. Instead they went around and switched all the price tags. Just imagine the frustration and confusion! He goes on to talk about the propensity within ourselves to switch the price tags - things that are valuable become not valuable. Once worthless things become important.

Read more… 418 more words

A reminder...

On Falling

My new living situation is interesting.  And by interesting, I mean challenging.

My roommate, bless her scattered little heart, leaves food on the counter for a couple of days.  Then it gets lost in the fridge for a few weeks.  Then, if we’re all lucky, she digs it out of the fridge and throws it into the trash.  A day later, the trash bag comes out of the bin and gets set on the floor, where it will sit for another 24+ hours.

I have a dog with more sass than sense.  She normally keeps to the upstairs portions of the house with me, but my attention span is imperfect.  You can imagine what happens next.

The dog mysteriously gets a vicious case of food poisoning.  She craps from one end of the house to the other.  It’s coming out of both ends.  If it didn’t stink so bad, it would almost be impressive.

After extensive cleanup, we go to bed.

The next morning, I wander my spaces sniffing for any hint of dog booty.  It all seems safe, so I rush to get her downstairs and out in case she’s been holding her bowls valiantly.  Down the stairs I go in my flip flops and a pull-on dress.  I get to the third step from the bottom and, with no transition between being upright and dying on my back, I fall.  It is a spectacular fall precipitated by hitting a patch of dog-sick at the bottom of the stairs at speed.

And I’m laying there on the stairs, struggling to breathe, trying to wrap my mind around the pain – as if by intellectualizing it, I might be able to compartmentalize it and work it through one compartment at a time.

Laying there, I found myself thinking “forget moving, no philosopher ever fell down the stairs with his/her philosophy intact.”

It still hurts, incidentally.  Mostly on my ribs.  The bruise on my tailbone seems to have worked itself out.

Which is part, but not all of why I’ve been silent.  There’s been a lot going on at work too.  I’ve been building content there, and lots of it, and frankly, there just hasn’t been that much to say.  Finding a philosophical approach gives you something to talk about it, but living it is devoid of interest.  Sometimes it’s about as interesting as listening to someone repeat a mantra for hours at a time.  Please let me do as logically as I can think.

Which might not be much of an aspiration.

Why We Hate Middle Age

Reblogged from The Daily Headache:

Every year, I participate in some kind of commencement ceremony. I have done this for the last 14 years. This year's ceremony is over and done with, but it still lingers at the edge of my mind.

I hate these events generally. They have a deadening quality of sameness.

I also find them full of offensive, propagandistic lies.

This year's I found a bit more pleasant.

Read more… 306 more words