Lessons

I am blogging from work. I have so much to do, and maybe it's unprofessional, but I really had to bang this one out because there's been a lot on my mind this morning.

I've been learning an overwhelming number of lessons lately. I feel like I'm being stretched to the breaking point, pressed down under the weight of the reality of my life. And it's a reality I am choosing in spite of its difficulty, although I have plenty of moments of doubt and anxiety. Some of what I'm learning...

1. I've always believed that relationships are what make this life so rich and worthwhile and that they're also what put us most at risk. They bring out the best and worst of experiences, the best and worst in ourselves. We have in us the power to build and create and also to hurt and destroy. I'm understanding this more and more every day -- it's one of the things that I have always known was true, but now I'm experiencing it more profoundly.

2. When making big decisions, it's easy to agonize. I tend to over-think things, to worry endlessly about the consequences of a decision before making it. I've had a lot of up and down days lately, and it's hard to keep track or predict where I'll be emotionally from one day to the next. So I've tried to be mindful on days when I'm feeling particularly emotional or anxious: those days are not decision-making days. So I try to save it for the days when I am calm and can consider things with clarity. The other days I focus on survival by whatever means possible.

3. Other people's desires and perceptions are terrible guides for personal decisions. This isn't to say being considerate is a bad thing -- but we have to live by our own consciences. I've spent a lot of time worrying about what people will think of me, how I live and the decisions I make and the truth of my failings. But the truth is, my story is mine, even if nobody understands it or if others reject it. I have become my own champion in some respect, as I've had to stand alone by my choices.

4. I'm learning that good and bad aren't as clear as I thought before, that they can get tangled up together in confusing ways. I guess this is why we're told, "Judge not lest ye be judged."

5. I've always had a strong fear of failure, and I've done a lot to avoid situations where I could fail. Right now I'm facing a massive fail, and I'm learning what it is to accept that failure. And a lot of that is learning what it means to fail and to continue loving and respecting myself. It's an uphill battle.

6. Related to my aversion to fail is my aversion to take any risk at all, but I've found myself in a situation where all I can choose is risk. I'm at a point in my life where any course I take could possibly lead to a lot of pain, so there is no "easy way out" option. So I'm learning what it is to make a decision and live it, come what may.

7. I've always been very goal-oriented -- everything I do, I want to be toward some greater purpose, some sort of clear meaning. I am learning to be present, in the current day and moment, and it's maybe the hardest thing to learn of all. I don't know what's next, I don't know if there's a "next", what I have is now, and so I have to be in it. My 17-month-old niece helps me with this a lot -- she knows nothing but the moment she's in, and she draws me into it with her. I'm trying to stop over-thinking and start living more.

8. I have to be more independent, confident, and assertive than I've ever been before. I have to take care of myself. This is an especially odd lesson because I thought I already had these things covered, but there's so much more to learn.

This feels rather brief relative to the amount of internal processing that's been happening in me, but I guess it's still pretty long. That's all for now...I'll probably be back with more soon

Optimistic Exhaustion

I am having a hard time putting together a really coherent thought right now. But lately I've been struggling to cope with the sheer volume of thoughts and emotions I've been experiencing, and putting any kind of structure around them is a challenge. A big theme is the way I set hopes and expectations for my life. I feel a lot of dissatisfaction, a longing for more, and the prevailing message I keep seeing people playing back in the world around me is, "At some point, you just have to settle and accept the way things are. Calm down, appreciate what you have, don't ask for more." The thing that makes it hard is that I do feel like I have a lot to be grateful for, but I am still unhappy in some big ways. And I think ultimately I'm an optimist, because I do believe that things can be better than they are, that there's a purpose in reaching for more. And I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. But there's something unsettling in optimism, too, because often people have to let go of "good" before they can achieve "great" -- the true test of optimism I guess. And if there's anything I'm learning, it's that life isn't tidy and there aren't guarantees, but that anything really worthwhile requires some risk and investment of oneself. This realization makes me feel perpetually exhausted lately, but I'm hopeful that it will eventually lead somewhere lovely and fulfilling. I think this is something like what President Obama has referred to as "the audacity of hope".

On a somewhat tangential but I think still related note, the Rushdie book I'm reading now, Fury, has a lot for me to think about and a lot that I relate to. There are a lot of quotable excerpts, but here's just one reflection on America (published in 2001) that I keep rereading. It's long, but this kind of reflection on the state of human affairs is why I'm in love with Rushdie:

In spite of all the chatter, all the diagnosis, all the new consciousness, the most powerful communications made by this new, much-articulated national self were inarticulate. For the real problem was damage not to the machine but to the desirous heart, and the language of the heart was being lost. An excess of this heart damage was the issue, not muscle tone, not food, neither feng shui nor karma, neither godlessness nor God. This was the Jitter Bug that made people mad: excess not of commodities but of their dashed and thwarted hopes. Here in Boom America, the real-life manifestation of Keats' fabulous realms of gold, here in the doubloon-heavy pot at the rainbow's end, human expectations were at the highest levels in human history, and so, therefore, were human disappointments. When arsonists lit fires that burned the West, when a man picked up a gun and started killing strangers, when a child picked up a gun and started killing friends, when lumps of concrete smashed the skulls of rich young women, this disappointment for which the word "disappointment" was too weak was the engine driving the killers' tongue-tied expressiveness. This was the only subject: the crushing of dreams in a land where the right to dream was the national ideological cornerstone, the pulverizing cancellation of personal possibility at a time when the future was opening up to reveal vistas of unimaginable, glittering treasures such as no man or woman had ever dreamed of before. In the tormented flames and anguished bullets Malik Solanka heard a crucial, ignored, unanswered, perhaps unanswerable question -- the same question, loud and life-shattering as a Munch scream, that he had just asked himself: is this all there is? What, this is it? This is it?