Struggles and Gifts

By most standards, it's been a rough day.  But what's on my mind now is not the difficulty of it, but the upshots and gifts I've received through it, so those are what I'm going to write about.

Sometimes I feel lonely because I have a fairly solitary life a lot of the time, but today I've felt connected and supported when I've needed it.  I have some great relationships, and I'm very grateful for them, though I may not always appreciate them the way that I should.

One of the relationships I have found more value in than ever is the one with myself.  Maybe that sounds strange, but being more aware of my own feelings and trying to listen and take better care of myself has made me feel calmer and more assured in the decisions I've made.  I feel like I know myself better now, and I'm a little wiser than I used to be.

I've been feeling more connected with God as well.  It's hard to write that sentence in a way, because the word and idea of "God" is so loaded and I don't like some of the conceptions that people have of God.  But what I mean is that I'm feeling more tapped into the loving, caring, and mindful spirit that's available and present in each moment.  Not an idea, but a reality to be experienced.  It's clicking more for me, in part thanks to Thich Nhat Hanh and Rob Bell who've helped articulate and guide my thinking lately.  It's sort of awakening my consciousness and renewing my interest in staying connected with some spiritual practice.

Heart in Motion

I'm on a sort of emotional upswing the past couple of weeks, possibly because I've started eating more nutritious food and I have more mental focus and energy than I did during the first couple of months of the year. And while I'm generally feeling pretty good about the state of things, there's also been a lot of troubling emotional stuff that I've been processing, though thankfully it's made easier by a few things, including the improvement in my overall health, the increased energy I feel for work and preparing to move next month, a very supportive relationship with my sister, and a therapist who is helping me to recognize and respond to the way I feel.

And speaking of feelings...the depth and range of emotions I've found myself experiencing makes me feel kind of crazy and unstable. I'm naturally analytical, and I've always tried to be very rational, objective, fair-minded, but I'm learning that there's deep wisdom in emotion as well. I have struggled at times to understand my feelings, especially the complicated ones over the last year or two while my marriage was ending and I began a new life on my own and now a new relationship with its own challenges. It's been unsettling to have such strong emotional responses in such variety, because I feel less in control than I ever have. But sometimes when I am talking with my therapist about what's going on in my life, I'm amazed how much insight comes from just recognizing my emotions, as well as how much I miss when I don't pay attention to them. I think I'm sort of on the remedial learning plan for feelings. For so long, I thought of them as a liability (and the feminist in me starts crying, "patriarchy!" since toughness and rationality are such valued masculine traits), but really they help balance and drive the best rational thought processes. They make sense of everything, because they tell us what's valuable.

This intertwining of emotions and rational thinking was the theme of a recent op-ed by David Brooks in the New York Times, and what he said resonated with me in this stage of my life. The full article is at this link, but an excerpt that particularly hit home for me was this:

"We have a prevailing view in our society — not only in the policy world, but in many spheres — that we are divided creatures. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect. Society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions.

This has created a distortion in our culture. We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below. We are really good at talking about material things but bad at talking about emotion."

I really want to be better at articulating emotion, but first I've been trying at least to let it surface more. I feel like I've bought the rationality-drives-progress message for too long, and I'd like to evolve beyond it to value experiences more.

How we view everything

Americans are control freaks. This sentence has been popping up in my head over the past few weeks as I've been thinking about what things will be like when I stay in India for a few months. Spending small amounts of time in a lot of different places in the past year has kept me thinking about how the places where we live, the culture and the population density and even the weather, shape how we view everything.

For instance, America is freakishly efficiently run compared to India and has a lot of conveniences freely available. One of the consequences of this is that many Americans get really irritated by things like not having free unlimited wifi with the purchase of a cup of coffee. In some ways, I think Americans are not sufficiently grateful for all that we do have; but then, some of the reason why we have so many good systems is that we have high expectations. On the other hand, the sense I've gotten in India is that no matter how you'd like the system to work, you often can't do anything about it -- so I've found the Indians I know to be far more adaptable to external circumstances (which can be good and bad in turn) where Americans would likely try to bend circumstances to our will (which also has pros and cons). Americans try to control things because where we live makes us more likely to believe that we're actually able to (which is sometimes a dangerous belief).

Something that works hand in hand with this is that the American dream is all about the pursuit of individual goals. There is a sense that it's our birthright to acquire and achieve. India is not wired so individually - social status is not as malleable, and families are much more involved in things that Americans would consider very personal, individual decisions (like who to marry). People in India also live in closer proximity to one another in general than Americans do (at least in Mumbai, which is a huge city crammed full of people). It's something I've felt a lot recently -- the American isolation. Our connections are fewer and thinner than the ones I've seen in India, and we are less likely to get involved in other people's problems or personal lives, even those of our close friends and family. I have more freedom to be myself and do what I want here in the US, but that means I also end up spending more time by myself. In India, my existence and needs just feel like less of an inconvenience to other people because everyone I've met there is used to having a lot of other people around and being active participants in each other's lives. There's less personal space, but there also seems to be less loneliness (though for an expat, I have a feeling that at times I'll feel lonely even in a crowd).

I suppose that's all for now...perhaps to be continued another time. Maybe when I'm actually back in India. :)

Relationships are hard

Relationships are hard. It's something that I've heard over and over, and I've never doubted that it's true, but I feel like I've been really deeply learning the truth of it through my experiences over the last year or two. And lately I've also been thinking about what's important to me in my relationships and what has made the good ones so strong and the bad ones so disappointing.

I think all people want to be understood and affirmed, but feeling the connection of understanding and shared experience is maybe the most important way that I feel close to other people. That moment when somebody's talking about their own experience and they describe perfectly what I've been feeling is priceless. And then there are those rare people who can listen to me and, even if they haven't experienced what I'm going through, they still show such empathy for me. I feel very lucky to have some really great people in my life, and I feel like they teach me how to be a better person in relationship to others as well.

And then there's the buzzkill: the relationships where understanding is elusive and empathy is seemingly out of the question, where you hold out hope but it's continually challenged. I've been struggling with this type of relationship over the past couple of weeks, feeling misunderstood and disregarded by someone I care about. Because I can see more clearly what I appreciate about my healthy relationships, the void in this one is all the more gaping. My instinct is to have a tough conversation to try to reach some point of understanding each other, but I am also really frustrated by feeling that if I don't take the initiative to deal with it, it will just never be dealt with. I know ultimately I'll have the conversation, but...it's hard. It's hard to be humble enough to admit I've been hurt and to choke down the disappointment in order to seek reconciliation.

To come full circle, though, I'm realizing that no relationship just stays good, and the best I can do is to know myself well enough to be aware of how I'm feeling about it so that I can take action to reconnect with the other person. I used to see my feelings as a liability, but now I'm finding them incredibly informative and constructive. They're helping me bring more things to the surface that would otherwise bubble underneath and continue wreaking havoc.