A.R. Williams's Blog, page 28

I Can Change

There’s a funny thing about change.  On one hand, it’s inevitable and the only constant.  On the other hand, I’ve heard from multiple people over the years that “people just don’t change.”  But yet you hear relationship experts talk about how you’ve got to fall in love again with your partner every 5 years because we all grow and evolve.

Besides, G-d help us if we can’t learn from our experiences.  Hell, even lab rats learn a maze in short order to get to the food.

So what’s the difference between personal growth, learning, and change?

I’ll offer up an example from my personal experience:  You can look at my childhood, back to the years when my ability to string a sentence together was brand new.  My great aunt was a life-long devotee to the conservative church I grew up in – a church that categorically eschewed chemical alterations of any variety – drugs, nicotine, caffeine, all were treated with the same degree of horror.  You just didn’t.  So when I walked into the room where this great aunt was convalescing and announced that “my daddy gives me coffee,” the lady nearly had an apoplectic fit.

And in that one incident, my innate ability to walk into a room and say the one thing guaranteed to freak everyone else out was revealed.  When the original Shrek came out and Donkey says “what’s the point in being able to talk if you’ve just got to keep secrets,” I felt like my life-long struggle with things that must not be said had been outlined perfectly by a cartoon ass.

It hasn’t changed.  It just doesn’t compute why we should all stand around not saying this one thing when we could say it and then move on.  I don’t get it.  If the emperor is starkers, we could all quit looking at his junk if someone would just hand the man some pants.  What’s the problem?  Like, it genuinely doesn’t register why a solution isn’t infinitely superior to leaving everyone’s sensibilities in tact while stupidity goes on unchallenged.

So what has changed?  Most of the time, the way I manage myself in these situations.  Now it isn’t an impulse that gets expressed without consideration.  I still find the naked emperor situation incredibly difficult to manage.  So I either walk away or try to find some way to get the man some pants without being obvious about it.

The thing itself hasn’t changed, how it is expressed has changed.  So does that qualify as change, growth, or learning?

I didn’t start out as a measured person.  I was a blurter; an impatient, everything has to be resolved and said right now, no I can’t hold my emotional reaction together in a state of patience or observation.  Intervention must happen and it must happen now.  Charge ahead with little consideration except that the right answer must be imposed this very second…  Solve every problem, accept every challenge, climb every mountain, resolve every issue…  That was me.  No sense of proportion, no ownership of the boundaries between me and everyone else.  Rash, impulsive, reactive, passionate, intense.  That was me, all the time.

And I’ve changed.  Dramatically.  Sometime in 2011 I woke up and I was all alone and I didn’t have a relationship to provide some kind of emotional stability and I discovered that I’d become the source of my own stability.  I wasn’t trying to rescue anyone and I didn’t need to be rescued.  There was no crisis, manufactured or otherwise.  With a handful of exceptions, I’ve held on to the things I genuinely value: method, analysis, neutrality.

The truth was I was tired of being at the mercy of external events and my emotional responses to everything and everybody.  External events weren’t going to go away.  It’s just not possible to control the external world.  Which left me with a choice.  I could either carry on as I had been, or I could get very clear about the boundaries between me and what happened in my life.  I’ve got new tools, a deeper understanding, better philosophy, and much practice in putting that philosophy to use.

Wholesale change?  No.  There are things I will be forever and ever amen.  But you can learn and grow.  You can get sick and tired of being sick and tired.  You can admit that what was isn’t working and choose something different.

Mortality News Flash

I get a regular e-newsletter from Mercola.com.  He’s a holistic doctor and the ins and outs of his health philosophy are better explored at his site in his words.  Yesterday’s newsletter, delivered at 2 in the morning, announced that *this* common drug will be responsible for 60,000+ deaths every year.  Quelle Horreur.  I know, I know, to each of the individuals in that list of 60,000+ names, death probably wasn’t the ideal outcome.  But we talk about “preventable deaths” like if we could just avoid the preventable deaths, we might be able to avoid the whole business entirely.

Here’s your mortality news flash: Oxygen and plain old water, if ingested for long enough, will inevitably lead to death.  To misquote Stoppard, for all that there are four points on a compass, from the moment of birth, there is only one direction.  In Tarot, everyone seems to be tragically afraid of card 13 – Death.  It’s rarely about actual death and most often symbolizes change.  Perhaps a profound change, but not necessarily the ultimate transformation.  Change is inevitable and the only thing you can count on and death is the inevitable capstone change to a life lived to the best of any of our ability.

You are going to die.  None of us know when or where or how, and that’s the point, isn’t it?  Anything we have in unlimited quantities we take for granted, time included.  You’re going to die.  You can’t change that, you can’t predict it, and unless you’re planning on a self-inflicted transition, you can’t control it.   This fact of our existence can either be used to stifle life here and now or it can be used as cause to celebrate the here and now which, lets face it, can be pretty damn beautiful.

So two things about the breathless headlines associated with mortality.

1)  They are framed in a way to increase fear and therefore increase compliance.  As previously mentioned, if you want to manipulate someone, scare the poop out of them.  They’ll purchase, they’ll alter behavior, they will lose their capacity to think clearly which, as we all know, is the marketer’s preferred state for their chosen market.

2) What’s wrong with talking about how you want to live instead of how you don’t want to die?  I’m sorry.  A far distant death of complications for diabetes 2 isn’t enough to keep me from my favorite threesome: Ben, Jerry, and me.  But right now?  Is the sugar headache, the inevitable gluttonous hangover, the congestion…  Is that how I want to live?  I’m gonna die.  It might as well be Ben & Jerry as anything else.  That’s not enough to dissuade me.  Get me thinking about how I want to live.  And I mean really live, not just exist.  And then talk to me about juicing.  Because unless death is imminent, it’s way too theoretical.

Milfs and the (un)Real Housewives...

Reblogged from the adventures of a 50 something chick at art school:

Woke up feeling kind of hung over this morning, though I didn't even enjoy any drinks last night.  Along with this new, improved internal heating system and hair that magically streaks itself, that's another new thing about 50 - drink free hangovers.  Who'd have thought 50 came with so much new and free awesome-ness?

Years ago, my then 70-year-old mother in law enthusiastically told me,

Read more… 640 more words

Fine Lines

There are some heuristics that I’ll stand by until there’s any evidence at all that they’re wrong.  One is that no one has ever thanked someone else for saving them.  At least not in the metaphorical sense.  My sister once gave a guy who had a heart attack and fell off a barn roof CPR until the ambulance showed up.  He thanked her for saving his life, but other than clear cases of being rescued from imminent death?  No one ever got thanked for trying to save someone.

The other relevant heuristic is that everyone gets to be the expert on themselves.  If someone says “I need x, y, and z,” believe them.  We know.  Give the other guy some credit.  Your friend with the bitch of a wife knows she’s a bitch.  But he’s juggling a bunch of competing priorities and if he isn’t dealing with the fact that his wife is a bitch right now, it’s because other things are a bigger priority.  You don’t get to decide for him.  You listen until he asks for something.  Your perspective is unwelcome until specifically invited.  Anyway, you’ve got whatever it is going in your own life that your friends are all looking at you and sighing over.  You know, Missy needs to loose twenty pounds.  She knows that her Momma has type 2 diabetes and if she keeps on the path she’s on she’s gonna end up there too.  It seems to be universally true that we all think we can live the other guy’s life to more success than they seem capable of.

So it’s generally better to celebrate the beauty you see in your friends and let the rest go.  They’re the expert and they aren’t going to thank you for interfering.

Which is a problem.  Because when you see someone standing in a hole, does lowering a ladder for them to take advantage of if they don’t like their hole anymore…  when they haven’t asked for a ladder…  does that count as the kind of saving that someone is never going to thank me for?  Inquiring minds want to know.

Sequester

Just a drive-by note on sequestration.

If we have to make our peace with that weirdo George in policy who picks his nose at his desk and insists on debating the constitutionality of the Louisiana Purchase before he’ll pass judgement on that thing that was due five minutes ago, Congress can put on their collective big girl panties and get on with doing their jobs.
This is a giant pissing contest intended to win the approval of a populace that happens to be judging the winner from the middle of the field.  How likely do you think it is that we’ll look favorably on the schmucks that just spent the past two years pissing on us?

Look, we all know that the days of solving governmental problems by throwing cash at them are over.  That’s a good thing.  We all need to recognize that the mentality that got us here – “cut that program over there that doesn’t actually impact ME” – has to end.  Everything needs to be trimmed.  We need to automate where we can.  We need to consolidate programs and functions.  We need to simplify, simplify, and simplify again.  We also need to remember that we can’t have everything.  When we paid Clinton-level taxes, we had a balanced budget.  And the 90′s are pretty universally remembered as a time of prosperity.   Do the math.

We’re in a mess that we created.  We created it by consistently sending the prom king or queen to represent us in Congress – all style and no substance – and now we’re surprised that they’re too busy preening on Fox/CNN/MSNBC to do any damn work.  We created it by being greedy and wanting our tax breaks AND our special interest funding.  We won’t get out of it by demanding that other people sacrifice in order to preserve our entitlements.

Raise taxes, solve the budget crisis, balance the budget, and sensibly drag the US government into the technological revolution.  Shrink the size of the federal payroll through the wave of federal retirements that are inevitable.  Reward efficiencies instead of rewarding the ability to plod on doing the same old shit in the same old way.  But by all means, don’t screw over our soldiers in the process.

In other words, we all need to quit our entitled bitching and get on with it.

Do-ing vs. Be-ing

Zen, in my unresearched impression, is focused on the be-ing of things.  In common parlance, be-ing is defined by that perfect slogan for acceptance: It is what it is.  No point in arguing with a post about your requirement for a shovel.  The post is the post and you’re more efficient to accept it in all of its woody postness.  Through be-ing, you can divorce yourself from expectations and surrender to what is.

This is a good thing, surrendering to what is.  This is a very good thing.

Except, like an epiphany, you can’t live there.  One of my favorite memories from college is going to the park on Friday afternoons to study math with a not-boyfriend we’ll call Bubba Hyde.  He taught me differential equations because I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t a dunce when it came to math.  When my head was full of x’s and y’s, he’d push me on the merry-go-round.

(Digression: when did the merry-go-round as a playground staple go out of style?)

I’d lay in the center and spin.  This was eastern Washington State and if you’ve ever been out there, the clouds are bigger and puffier and whiter than they are anywhere else in the world.  It was surrender to the wonder of “it just is,” and as complete of a surrender as I’ve ever managed.

(note to self: add a merry-go-round to your fantasies of a dream house.)

I’d go back to that park, that merry-go-round, the inexplicable delight I took in Bubba’s clove-flecked eyes a minute, but surrender is a place to revisit, it isn’t a place to live.  Eventually you get hungry and it gets dark and all that wonderful surrender must, by the nature of the reality you just surrendered to, turn into do-ing.

Everyone’s list of be-ing is a cluttered mess of experiences, personality traits, biological and evolutionary imperatives and noble impulses.  Mine isn’t any prettier than the next guys.  But here’s the universal challenge: make peace with the be-ing.  It is what it is.  That list is as recalcitrant as that post that refused to become a shovel.  Accept it, surrender to it, and then let it be.  Just as the post doesn’t determine whether some other composition of the elements will or won’t turn into a shovel, your be-ing doesn’t have to determine your do-ing.

Accept your be-ing.  Choose your do-ing.

And find yourself a merry-go-round.  I don’t care if you’re too old for that kind of foolishness.  So am I.

Love as a Practice

There was a lot of attention pointed in the direction of this blog over a post last fall titled A Theory of Love.  The genesis for that post was a number of people having opinions about what my object of adoration says about me and an epiphany/raging defense of my love for perfectly imperfect people.  We’re now nearly four months on.  Four months of perfect imperfection characterized by silence, interminable arguments with myself, embarrassingly unironic renditions of drippy pop songs in the shower, and a mostly unshaken faith in the beloved.

The epiphanies are grand.  They really are.  You get this flash of clarity, like when the eye doctor flips the lens and all of a sudden the letters in front of you swim into sense and you understand everything.  But eventually your eyes get used to being able to see the leaves on the trees in detail and in reality, you’re seeing them to the same degree you were when you were blind.  There’s a metaphor in there for something, but I’m going to have to revisit that later.

The epiphany, the declaration of intent, is only part of it.  The epiphany is the result of a lot of thinking and not-thinking put under pressure until out explodes the sharp understanding of perfect clarity.  The epiphany leads to the declaration of intent.  Together, the importance of the two cannot be overstated.  They are an example of the same impulse that has you standing over the exercise DVDs at Target, except bigger and better because they’re a statement of intent towards how you approach your life and love.    But like that exercise program, the hard part isn’t done all at once.  It’s done a little bit every day.

This is why the epiphany is so seductive.  You can have an epiphany once and be done with it.  You’ve checked it off the list of things to do and you can put it behind you having accomplished a complete understanding of the thing, or at least your role and preferred approach to the thing.

Four months later, which is not much time in the trajectory of a Big Love, how am I doing after the epiphany?  Let’s just say I’m more faithful to the practice of love than I am to the promise I made of getting myself in Bond Girl shape this year.  My doing is consistent, my thinking has faltered here and there, but overall is in line with my conclusions from November.

Somehow, I come to my best conclusions over the iron, a truth that I find rather disconcerting.  Couldn’t I get myself back on track doing something better than ironing?

I don’t think there’s a secret.  I negotiate for neutrality on a daily basis.  I diagram the difference between my fears and my certainties and choose my certainties.  Most of the time.  If not on the first branch of the decision tree, then on the second or third.  I’ve had plenty of time to know this man – I’m not trying this experiment in faith on someone that I met at a club and thought was hot, I have externally verifiable data to back up my high esteem.  And at the end of the day, when I’ve got nothing left, I lean on the knowledge that I’m here because it’s where I want to be.  Having the experience of being loved and loving in this way, I’ll never settle for less again.

The epiphany had its own coltish beauty, being brand new in the world.  Living up to the epiphany isn’t so pretty.  Couple it with the state of being unemployed and it looks like walking around the house in my pajamas muttering about there being a time after this and arguing about sorting my thoughts into clearly labeled piles of fears and certainties.  I could carry the epiphany in my pocket and feel it’s certainty carry my spine straighter.  Now it’s like a constant, muttering scavenger hunt, not unlike sifting through the ashes of a house fire for scraps of poems.  I’ve got no reason to tell anyone, least of all myself, that this is the sensible thing to do.  But I’ve yet to convince myself that there’s something else I’d rather be doing.

Free Stuff Tomorrow

Everyone likes free, right?  Well, tomorrow (2/27/13) is one of my free promotion days on Amazon for both books, starting with The Camellia Resistance…

and if you’re done with that or feeling frisky, there’s always the naughty stories in Mine.

 

Enjoy, and don’t hesitate to comment/review/ask questions/let me know what you think…

Grateful #1

A couple of months back, I had a 10 minute coaching session with a coworker.  Her number one bit of advice was to write down 10 things I was grateful for every night as a means to adjust my perspective on the world.  I have to admit, some nights I crawl into bed and can’t think of 10, but since I’ve been wordless as of late, perhaps it’s a good place to start.

This video, which made me cry in a good way.
SoundCloud, where I’ve been indulging my Tricky fetish.
Unemployment
My mother, for donating rent this month
Lily-the-dog, for being a general goofball
SBS, just because
Tink, for helping me keep it all in perspective
Options
Stay, by Rihanna
10 hours of sleep every night

If you don’t have anything nice to say…

Sit next to me.

But what if you don’t have anything at all to say…  or at least anything new?  I’ve been running into my common themes as I navigate the muddy waters of unemployment.  I sit down to say something about accusing other people of doing annoying sh!t is generally just a roadmap back to something that you yourself are guilty of.  Oh wait, I already said that.  I’ve stopped talking about my romantic disasters, so I’ve been spared people judging me for extending compassion when a calculation of my “worth” would dictate a defense of my own deserving.  I’m doing pretty well with the denial of expectations project, or at least as well as can be expected.

Other than that, nothing is moving as quickly as I want it to and I’m at least keeping the under the wave instead of over it theory in mind, if not always perfectly at peace about it.

The trouble with relative equilibrium is that it doesn’t leave you much to blog about.  A blessing and a curse, no?