Day: January 31, 2017

Life is short: Prioritize the adventure

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I wrecked my car back in October (see image below; it does not show how bad it was – car was completely totaled). It was kind of a surreal experience – a learning experience. You know how you sort of know how things work in a country you have always lived in because you experienced it, knew others who had experienced it or saw it on TV (for example, you witnessed emergency vehicles come to the scene of an accident in reality or on a medical drama)? But when you move to a different country, the whole process may be different. Or it may be exactly the same with slight differences. When my car collided with a tractor (yes, a tractor – also visible in the background in the photo), it seemed like everything was moving in slow motion. At no time did I feel fear. No idea why; even the paramedics at the scene and the medical personnel at the hospital kept saying, “You are so calm. How are you so calm?”.

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The car spun around completely so it was facing the complete opposite direction from the one I had been traveling in, and the back end of the car was in a ditch. I was able to climb out of the car easily, and the only instantly obvious injuries were loads of small cuts on my legs, which were bleeding, creating a puddle of blood in one of my shoes. Of course the fire department, ambulance and police all eventually showed up, and I was taken to a nearby hospital to be checked out. I had a lot of major bruises all over me from the seat belt, a lot of small cuts on my legs – most of these things are now healed except for some very deep bruising on my inner calves, one of which is still discolored, more than three months later. In this process I found that the whole thing plays out about like it would in the US or on TV shows… but some small things, of course, were somewhat different, such as the car insurance stuff being resolved in about three days, being charged about 40USD for the whole debacle (can only imagine what it would cost in the US) and the police phoning me a week after the accident just to check that I was okay. (I guess it would also be appropriate to say, even though mortality never crossed my mind throughout the entire car-crash incident and aftermath, that these small ‘events’, too, should influence the prioritization of adventure. You don’t really know what’s coming for you – I had just returned from a trip and had no food in the house, dashed to the store, ten minutes from home, and crashed only about five minutes away from my house, a true statistic. It could have been much worse, even fatal, and would any of the stupid rationalizations I routinely come up with to stop myself from doing things I really want to do matter any more? No.)

Where I live, it is not really possible to be without a car, but I worked with the lack of transportation for a while. I was in a bit of shock after the crash and had convinced myself that I immediately wanted to move to a city and started planning to move to Berlin. This meant I did not want to spend money buying a new car. I did not want to drive at all. I eventually realized I needed to buy something at least temporarily, but then I could never quite make myself purchase any of the crap I looked at. In the end, my enthusiasm for Berlin died away, and I bought something else and am still weighing the options on moving to a city (or not). So many things have happened just in the time since I went to Berlin to look at flats that I’ve had trouble making a decision – despite my own dislike for indecision. Oddly, other people’s indecision seems to influence my own ability to make decisions, and this is kind of troubling.

Sometime in the limbo of not having a car, casually looking at car websites, I happened to see an old Honda del Sol for sale in southern Sweden – something that I thought would pique my brother’s interest. It is a car he knows how to take apart and rebuild. He knows everything about it and loves it, having owned two himself since the early 1990s. I did not really think by sending him the link to the car that he would insist that he wanted to buy it, but that is exactly what happened. At the time, when he decided to come to Sweden to see the car, I felt a bit put out because it was really inconvenient and really bad timing. I did not even have my own car but was going to try to help him buy a hobby car? I had to take an expensive taxi ride to the train station, take a six-hour train ride to Malmö and meet him down there and then go look at this car that he might not even want once he saw it. (And then of course he did not have the money in hand when he did want it, so I had to pay for it upfront and that did not go entirely smoothly either, even though it worked out within a day.) In terms of time, timing, finance and transport the entire thing was crazy for me. And why did he need to buy a car in Sweden (to keep at my house) anyway? But that is exactly what happened.

He flew to Copenhagen and then came to Malmö to meet with me, and we bought this car. (Never mind the ensuing inconvenience once he departed – I still had to drive the car home the six hours back to the woods; it was winter but the car has weird-sized tires, so I could not find anywhere that had winter tires in stock. I stayed several days in Gothenburg, halfway home, waiting out the wintry weather, as the forecast called for a warm break during which it would be a good time to complete the drive back.)

It all worked out… and upon reflection, it is a valuable, even treasured, memory and experience. I spent quality time with my brother, who is one of the closest people in the world to me, had a true adventure (and that is another thing I learned/experienced for the first time – I had never purchased a car privately, only through dealerships, so I found out how easy that – and getting a car added to insurance – is), and appreciated the moment, despite, or maybe even because of, its inconveniences. It was only a short week or so later that our uncle died; we knew when we were in Malmö together that the end was coming, and this impending loss made us feel all the more appreciative of our time together and all the adventures we have prioritized having. Our mom and her brother were as close as my brother and I are, so she has been suffering. And even if/when my brother and I face that same kind of loss of each other, we at least will have our memories of travel adventures together.

(Oh, and certainly it goes without saying: don’t prioritize having an adventure like crashing your car. It is not worth it. Haha. I did not end up buying a replacement car until mid-December, and then it was another road trip adventure (for me alone) – car was in Stockholm (really far away).)

Free: Hit the nail on the head

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…rambling… trying to sort through some thoughts and feelings… all seems trivial given the state of things in the world, but i can’t change the running commentary in my head…

Some days, you are just going along, getting stuff done, and someone reaches out after ages – years even – and says/writes something offhandedly that strikes a nerve, hits the nail on the head… and it happens to come at a timely moment. It might not have registered at all any other time – and in this case not all of it does – but the fear and the preference for being alone stuff certainly does. But it also prompts thoughts that finally move you beyond the confines of the walls you’ve lived inside and how you had been thinking but didn’t realize as well as ways you’ve defined yourself and let yourself be defined, even unconsciously.

“I know you are a nice person, but for sure many people would say you are wild, weird, lonely, and maybe more weird. But I know you are just protecting yourself from suffering and especially from men that can wish to play with you. You are genuine, you dare to say things, maybe much more with family, unknowns or friends than with your own partner. You would love to share, but are too much on the defensive as you are scared of bad endings.

I believe you have everything to scare a man. Intelligence, intellectually independent, financially autonomous; either you attract men who want to play with you and very quickly you kick them out of your life, or I’m so sure that so many will run away from you as they cannot reach you. They are too macho and only want to have power on you, but they do not understand that you are not a weak woman, so they run away or you get rid of them.

I was wondering what can be wrong with you. It happened to me to think you were probably too selfish, too independent and really too wild. But I’m sure you are not. This is what people can see from your outside. That is not you at all, you are just tired of wasting your time with stupid men and prefer to stay alone.” -French guy

These impressions from someone who never knew me that well – but apparently knew me better than I imagined – made me mope around a bit. Yeah a lot of this stuff is true – I recognize the pattern (and have been stuck in this “going through old papers and being struck by patterns” mode of late), but there is a bigger picture that I do suddenly see. I have known, of course, as I am relatively self-aware, that I am defensive, that my brain erects walls for me that I am not even aware of any more it’s become so automated, and that I prefer to stay alone … but only partly for those defensive reasons. I prefer to stay alone because I like to be alone. It is, most of all, my way of being free – and living most authentically (Camus), even when it is painful. And to want to not be alone – it takes something tremendous and almost otherworldly to make me want it.

I have occasionally tried to tell myself that being with someone else – the right someone else – might enhance who I am (and who they are). But more often than not, being with someone else, it is frustrating, and I end up suffocating the part of me that I like most – the part that probably attracts others to me in the first place. (I have witnessed this same syndrome in friends when they pair off and find themselves miserable and wonder what happened. This is what happened: You inadvertently kill the free person that you – and they – love(d).) You don’t mean to; you just do. Is it possible, if you are this kind of person, to be with someone else and keep that free person alive and forgo subsuming yourself and your needs somewhere within or beneath theirs? If so, I have not yet figured out how.

This carefree, spontaneous, open person who takes risks and action and moves forward no matter what can become stifled, bogged down in things that are not even mine, completely without conscious realization. It just happens. I have written about it before (both the caretaking side that takes control and agonizes before the eventual and the inevitable indifference monster comes calling as well as the seeming one-sided nature of these things, as evidenced in the mismatch among people’s words, actions and obvious priorities. And of course the “fuck-yes test”, which I think I would benefit from returning to again and again to remind myself) without fully appreciating what I was stating. Here and here and here and here and a whole lot more.

Half of me is an inveterate caretaker with nothing or no one to care for (which I guess is why it is so easy to shift from just being generally supportive to letting emotions be overrun by caring about someone else when they are going through unpleasant and confusing stuff). In another person’s worries, cares, indecision and flight from or fright of whatever is going on in their own lives and heads, the me who lives freely becomes too wrapped up in the minutiae of caring about them, trying to make sure they are not drowning, absorbing their doubts and worries. This part of my nature – the stable caretaker – takes over and becomes hesitant, reserved, emotionally idle – “always afraid to say more than it meant” (Auden, “The Letter”) or afraid to say too much, not being able to take it back. Too careful.

Nothing wrong with any of it except that when I take on that role, I become someone else, someone I do not like very much, especially if it starts to consume me or become the primary focus of the interaction with the other person. The marshmallow of my well-hidden insides starts to melt while an almost passive-aggressive, gooey pain seeps out of my pores. And it’s no one’s fault. Not the other person’s. Not mine. It just is: On the surface a feeling of being like – or fearing being like – an auxiliary but subjective amateur therapist who will offer true and deep understanding and care, along with observations, advice and opinions. Underneath, it is clear that I perform these tasks – willingly and lovingly – despite knowing with a reasonable amount of certainty (and simultaneously fearing and wishing it were not so) that I am merely a stepping stone to whatever comes next in a person’s life. I may be a one-woman transition team.

And it’s this deepening realization on being free (and what it means to me) and the role(s) I play in other people’s life dramas that relieves me of recent little agonies, confusion and worries, that frees me finally from the definition I had lived by but had never actually defined.

I have a choice (and somehow never felt like I did). Both of these parts, conflicting or not, are equally part of me. With or without doubts, I don’t relish the idea of looking back on my life and thinking I had abandoned either principle: my freedom or care/love/compassion. It may be difficult to strike, as all balances are, but is it not worth “a little hour or more/To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came/To soothe a time-torn man…” (Thomas Hardy)?

“In any situation, no matter how confining, you have a choice. To believe you do not, is to choose not to choose.”

“If we seek to lose ourselves in the world, we are eluding. We are seeking a diversion from knowing ourselves or tending our own soul.”

“We must choose to live in this world and to project our own meaning and value onto it in order to make sense of it. This means that people are free and burdened by it, since with freedom there is a terrible, even debilitating, responsibility to live and act authentically.” -Camus

Photo (c) 2008 Jon Mitchell.