And the time…Where’d it go?
Last night I dreamt that I was 65 years old. I was in a panic as I had no recollection of the previous 30 years. I ran up to my husband, grabbing him at the shoulders and I asked him how I hadn’t known that we’d grown so much older. I was exactly as I was now, but with far less time ahead of me. I could hardly contend with the gravity of my situation and the implications such a realization brings.
On the drive home that night I was thinking about something my partner had said to me a few days earlier during a fit of churlishness on my part which started an argument between us. He said I had no reason to be acting as I was, so childish and impertinent being that I’m ‘half 70’, implying that my behavior was not becoming of a 35 year old competent person in the world. And he wasn’t wrong. As of late, I’ve been bursting at the seams, loathing the mundanities of my day to day life and the choices that I’ve made that have placed me precisely where I am today. Choices. I’ve made them. I think if I continue to remind myself of that, and how lucky I am to simply have a warm, lovely place to lay my head at night, I could be rid of some of the dissatisfaction and malaise I feel of late. But it’s hard. The anger is there and it isn’t going away.
So, there is clearly something wrong, and I think I’ve identified what it is, and simply put it’s that a part of me hasn’t grown up. For all the wisdom that my upbringing engendered in me, and for all of the discipline I developed to make my own way in the world, a part of me was left untended, the thorny vines of my discontent growing stronger all of the time, and without my understanding it was happening. It has only recently become clear to me that I cling too tightly to things, to my life, which takes me out my experience of it, and most damagingly, I hold onto the notion that I can actually save my family and make their lives better. In this process I have internalized one of the most incorrect summations I’ve ever made based on my experience and knowledge of a thing in that I truly believed if I wanted a better life for them enough, it would actually happen.
I blame this misguided idea on the influence my mother’s magical thinking had on my developing mind, her particular brand being a blend of Catholic iconography, wonderment for the the gnostic books, the placing of intentions into crystals, calling upon arc angels for guidance and protection, falling on your knees for mercy when things were their worst, karmic debt and things of the like, which had me believing for a long time that my love and intention coupled with direct action would fix my family, a challenge essential to my survival as I did not believe, and still hardly can shake the idea that I could have comfort or happiness until they had those things, too.
The beauty of such a way of being is that it allows you to see yourself in others, fostering understanding and the ability to love all beings unconditionally, qualities which can truly move mountains and change the world. Things that could be useful as a beautiful means to express the ineffable and more mysterious aspects of the human experience are too easily co-opted by charlatans and subject to the trappings of the ceremonial and bureaucrat rules of playing a finite game. Finite games having rules, with the object being to win or lose where as an Infinite game seeks not to end, but morph in order to carry on and sustain play. This concept is from and is best elucidated in the book ‘Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility” by James P. Carse, and if this is going to become somewhat of a bookclub, which I think was always bound to happen, this would be recommended reading. Find a way to send me your thoughts on it.
So, I harvest the sick and rotted crop of my anger, and eat it with resentment in my heart, unable to swallow my pride and accept the help that is right there, always. I chose to take the poison and here we are. I seem always to forget the wonderful Stephen Crane poem;
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
If I keep forgetting, I think I’ll find that I’m indeed living the dream.