Living Unimportantly

I've been in the mood to blog lately but haven't felt very articulate or organized. I guess that's becoming a pattern, that I have to write when I'm not at my most clear-headed instead of biding my time, or else I will never get around to it.

One thing that has been on my mind is the way I've been so bad at relationships of all kinds. Maybe I'm being overly critical of myself, but I can definitely see that my pattern of trying to be self sufficient has led me to isolate myself unintentionally. I think I learned this honestly, and there were reasons during my childhood and adolescence that helped push me in that direction. It's a little difficult for me to tease apart introversion and self-directedness from true isolation, but I sense a lack of depth in my relationships at times. I can see a family pattern of isolation, of believing we should all take care of ourselves and not wanting anyone to count on us being there or offering something, for fear that it will take some of our freedom. I think this fear of entanglement and commitment has driven me to be anti-social at times. And it's more clear now, at this point in my life when my connections are at a particularly thin point, that I haven't always nurtured the ties I have with other people the way that I should have. It seems a little late to be realizing this...but I'm glad I am, even if I'm a slow learner at this part of life.

Maybe it sounds like a sad realization, but it's not entirely so. As my brain learns to see things in new ways and my heart is also given more room to do some of the "seeing", there are things I've gained. Like less existential panic...I feel now that even though I have not exactly done or accomplished what I previously thought I could or should, it seems to matter less if I realize that life isn't just some sort of an individualized goal-seeking mission, but also a shared experience. That is, if I am able to build good relationships, that already seems much more fulfilling and meaningful than whatever grand purpose I think I should have. I still don't totally have my head in that mode, it still confuses me a bit that life is really in the living and not the observing and planning and achieving, but it's already given me some relief not to feel so much of the weight of trying to be or do something important. Apropos of this realization, I read this the other day:

"Yours is to live it, not to reveal it."

These words are from a final conversation that poet Mark Nepo had with Helen Luke, his mentor for a couple of years, until she passed away. These were Helen's words of advice for Mark, and here's what he had to say about them:

They have troubled me, for I have spent my life becoming a writer, thinking that my job has been just that -- to reveal what is essential and hidden. In the time since Helen died, I've come to understand her last instruction as an invitation to shed any grand purpose, no matter how devoted we may be to what we are doing. She wasn't telling me to stop writing, but to stop striving to be important. She was inviting me to stop recording the poetry of life and to enter the poetry of life. This lesson applies to us all. If we devote ourselves to the life at hand, the rest will follow. For life, it seems, reveals itself through those willing to live. Anything else, no matter how beautiful, is just advertising.

I'm hoping that in the months and years to come, I can really learn to live this way. I feel sometimes that some distorting lens has been taken away from my eyes...or maybe a new corrective lens has been added. Maybe it's because I just had an eye appointment for the first time in years, but I think my literal farsightedness is a pretty apt metaphor for the way I have so often missed all the great things that are close by and immediate in life.