randomness

tide

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This year, I may have turned a page or two in the book that makes up this life but haven’t lived up to everything I am capable of and wanted to do. This is always a disappointing realization as a year comes to a close, even if the responsibility for this failure falls squarely on me. I could make (mostly valid) excuses, but there’s no sense pointing out all the things that have been out of my control, all the things that dragged me down, all the things I avoided.

Instead it’s more logical to turn the tide rather than the page. Take a different approach. Stop falling into bad habits, lazy patterns and comfort zones. Sit in the moment without trying to change things that do not need to be changed; focus on the things that need to.

proselytize and convert

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I checked my mailbox the other day to find a handwritten letter from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was fairly lengthy and accompanied by some of their propaganda. Honestly, I live in a remote place and feel quite violated by this kind of intrusion. Sure, maybe they didn’t come to my door, but given my choice to live so far off the beaten path… WTF are you people even doing out here?

Even if I took actions to ward them off – a Star of David on my mailbox, a mezuzah on my door frame… these are either things they don’t understand or an invitation to more aggressively attempt to convert and “save” me – but these symbols, in addition to my rural retreat, scream out LEAVE ME ALONE. What is it about these cult “religions” that makes them refuse to accept that no one wants their brainwash-induced bullshit?

I shouldn’t let this make me as angry and offended as it does. But if you have to go door to door and badger people into listening to or buying whatever snake oil nonsense you’re selling, it can’t be all that compelling in the first place.

 

parenting

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I have been thinking a lot about how we are at least partly (quite a lot, really) shaped by the kind of parenting we received. Like it or not, it takes a lifetime to unravel some of the ingrained feelings that parents and caretakers may have woven into our being without knowing it or meaning to. I had a long conversation with my dear friend JEB a few weeks or months ago (who knows when – it’s so easy to lose track of time), and he said he once questioned the nature of parenting as such: “Do you want to show them who’s boss or how to live in the world?”

This struck a chord with me as well, having lived under the unpredictably tyrannical mania of someone who wanted to control everything but had remarkably little control over anything, most of all, himself. But when you are young, new in the world, how can you put this insight into perspective? That is, when you’re, say, five years old, how can see that the mania of one of the people closest to you, who is charged with your care and upbringing, and not think it is deeply frightening while at the same time knowing nothing else, so extrapolating that this is normal? How can that not make you build associations that take a lifetime to demolish, i.e. if this man is angry and unpredictable and cannot be trusted, can any man be otherwise? Or, if one’s parent seems unable to express affection or seems unable to acknowledge his/her children’s accomplishments, or seems jealous of (while simultaneously and confusingly proud of) his/her children’s abilities or achievements, how can these things not make up significant parts of the foundation of one’s personality (at least that which is influenced by environment)?

Photo by Alfred Schrock on Unsplash

 

 

 

will never be

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“You had to work hard to prevent your mind from sabotaging you by its looking hungrily back at the superabundant past.” –Everyman, Philip Roth

How do things shift without warning? And when they do, how is it that one continues with what has now become a charade? Why go through the motions? How is it that one leads, at least temporarily, a dual life, protesting ardently against the selfsame thing? Indecision? An inability to confront the past with the weaponry of the future – or living in a constant present-day limbo, hoping someone else will make all the decisions and demands?

I cannot answer these questions. But speculating and regulating lead me away from the things that are not and will never be.

Photo by Benjamin DeYoung on Unsplash

permission space

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Comfort is a strange and bizarrely entitled expectation. How did we arrive at this place where we feel angry, entitled, unreasonable and demanding when we must experience just moments of discomfort? I think about this a lot, but there are moments when it takes over entirely.

I was stepping off a train in Stockholm not so long ago when I saw an older woman descending the one or two very narrow and steep steps to disembark the train, and she slipped and fell, hard, her leg sliding between the train step and the platform. She screamed out, and her leg bent the wrong way completely. People gathered around to help. After wincing and thinking about what I could possibly do, I decided to just walk away, but the violence and suddenness of the moment stuck with me for days. What this has to do with comfort isn’t exactly clear. But such moments jar me from my walking cocoon and being in my own world to question all these things, like what right we think we have to being comfortable all the time.

 

 

cog

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It will surprise exactly no one to learn that failed Theranos‘s failed founder, Elizabeth Holmes, is the daughter of a former (failed in the biggest way and should have been a cautionary tale but isn’t!) Enron exec. Haha. I’m about to read Bad Blood, the saga of the rise and fall of Theranos, thanks to being reminded of it last night by my good friend JEB. But before the reading for enjoyment, there’s the rest of this week to get through work-wise and school-wise. It’s too easy to fall behind with just a slight turn in the schedule.

This time last week, I passed my thesis project in the neverending saga of my 2012-begun master’s program. Many people asked if I felt relief, or possibly even that sense of emptiness that often follows finished projects that have occupied so much time and space in our lives and brains that their completion leaves a (disappointing/disappointed) void. But I find I don’t even have time to feel much of anything. I have ongoing real work  and schoolwork (for the current degree program) and another thesis coming up. No time to rest in the void.

Photo by Valentin Salja on Unsplash

please don’t

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There are things you cannot change until you accept them. I have always hated the moments when people are deluded about themselves and their time. Protesting, “But it will be calmer soon…” or planning for some illusory moment down the line when they’ve organized themselves better, when this or that thing is finally resolved, yes…. then there will be time. Then they will embrace the life they really want for themselves. But that time never comes. Because this chaos you wade through now is your life… and without accepting it as the norm, you can’t find a sustainable way to step outside and change that norm.

I am not immune to this behavior – it just depends on the cast of characters. With most people I bend over backwards to put them first, dropping everything to be there for them. We’re told, after all, that what matters in the end –  and should matter all through the journey – is people, right? The people we care about. So if they are most important, I am going to treat them that way. But that only considers that these are the people who are important to me… there are still people who demand attention or time, but if I don’t perceive them as important, I am just as guilty as everyone else of putting them off with the endless protests of, “It’s so busy right now but it will calm down when…”. And it’s never going to calm down – first because I keep taking on more and more stuff that I want to do but also because, whether I like that person or not, they aren’t atop my list of beloved-important-people.

On the other side of this equation, people who are most important to me may not feel that I am important to them. Sometimes I feel this, even if it’s not true. Mostly because if you’re not a squeaky wheel, showing that you need attention or time, you’re probably not going to get it.