Sunlight in the Shade

In spite of the claim in my last blog entry that I want to write more, I haven't posted here in nearly two months. What's up with that?

Well, I've been doing some heavy thinking about what I want in life, and unfortunately no easy answers came. I have given up for now my community in Guelph, Ontario and instead embraced the familiar feel of the Magic community in Palo Alto. This process of trying to be kind to myself has been very difficult, and tends to still be a wild ride from time to time. I haven't had many moments of clarity where I can sit down and generate good material to share with the world. I've been down on myself, down on the world, or just feeling down without an object, and that has been hard. So that's part of my excuse. The other part is that I have been doing lots of writing, just not here in the blog. But let's stick to the important stuff.

In this dark night of my soul, I've been often unable to reach out for help. Why is that? Well, I often have this feeling that the rest of the world (i.e. everybody I see in my life on a regular basis) has it all "figured out." To me that means they've got the answers to their questions, if not chiseled in stone then at least adhered to the stone with a durable marine epoxy that's going to last a long time. Do I know that they have it all figured out? Of course not! That would only come from me asking them, "Hey, do you have It all figured out?" and them saying, "Oh yeah, I wrapped up the package of my life a few years ago and now I'm just crossing T's and dotting I's. Why do you ask?" But when I feel stuck and fearful inside, like I'm never going to be able to figure MY life out, find peace, or be able to answer the question How much is enough?, then I project my desire for inner peace on the rest of the world by imagining that everyone else is at peace with all their choices and has a smooth plan for near 100% life satisfaction into the foreseeable future.

Do I know that this is a false projection? Yes. I often get stuck in my fearful little reptilian head, though, and can't easily get out of the illusion that I'm being left behind by my peers as they settle into marriages, houses, parenthood, careers, etc. It's a tough illusion to crack, especially when I'm less interested in telling the story in my head that they are wrong, but rather just want to be okay with a different path for myself. I mainly want to be okay with not quite knowing yet how and to what I want to commit my life. I know that I am doing it by all the choices I make. From the outside, you can truthfully say that I'm committed to a life of:

working part time - 25 to 35 hours per week
not accumulating much money
not spending much money
self and social experimentation
traveling around the U.S. and Canada
staying connected with diverse groups of friends in many different cities
swinging between serial monogamy and non-exclusive dating
constantly diversifying my skill set
being a generalist
reading and writing a lot
social rather than financial capital

These are some of the hallmarks of my life. I want to get to a place of either feeling at peace with my choices or changing my life so that I feel better about them. Right now I often feel stuck in between. I think in many ways my choices are reasonable. I like many aspects of my lifestyle, and I think our culture needs another competitive, narrowly-focused white male like we need a hole in the ozone layer. But I know that I get afraid sometimes because we, in our North American affluent society, value money and the accumulation of wealth more than an experimental life that may not yield the same type of capital security.

Every lifestyle has benefits and costs. I'm working on accepting the benefits of my lifestyle choices so far (more time freedom, more life spent with loved ones, more recreation) and finding peace with my trade-offs (less money, fewer stamps of approval from mainstream folks). This work is where the rubber is meeting the road of my life, where the real action is at.

Beyond all these worries, I've recently been reading and thinking about some ideas that I find compelling and useful. In the past few days I have gotten a lot of mileage from thinking about fear. I like the idea that we all live our lives in the face of fear. Any big or small action we take is scary to some degree. Big fears, like abandonment or failure, can rule our lives if we focus on the fear. What I've found liberating is the idea that fear is never going to go away. We always need to take action in the face of fear. Waiting for our fear to disappear is to wait forever. Instead, we can live much better by recognizing that we will be able to handle it if the thing we're afraid of comes to pass. If we fail in our marriage, can't close the deal, end up working way too many hours each week, or can't afford to own the house in the long run, we will be able to handle those things as they happen. We don't need to focus on them as likely possibilities. We can simply acknowledge the possibility of their occurrence and take action anyway. This may not be rocket science for you, but it feels like a big step forward for me. Perhaps I've known it all along, but now I've found it at the right time and it jives with my needs and hopes.

Some other useful ideas... hmmm... I think we really benefit by being in touch with wilderness. I think that's why most of us feel something intense and at least slightly pleasant when we're at the ocean. It is wilderness for sure. It may not appear as highly differentiated as a mixed deciduous forest, but it is large, powerful, and indifferent to us. In spite of our highly effective impacts on the life in the ocean, the sound and the feel of the waves when you sit on the beach is still amazing. Each one is unique, yet also just like the billions that have come before and will come after. The sound is perfect white noise, varying yet constant. It is a place to be so as to remember our connection with the Earth as part of us and vice versa. We are not in control and nature bats last, for sure, but we are still steeped in this illusion of control in our lives that comes with living in a rectilinear world designed mainly by human minds and hands. Returning to wilderness, whether a the beach, dense forest, or somewhere else, is a return to a feeling of connection with the world larger than us. It is therapeutic. We can heal ourselves with such contact.

Thanks for reading this. Thanks for being out there, doing your own thinking and processing. I take heart in our journey, in loving ourselves and being kind to each other through such dark times as my own recent trouble. Let's push on into the mystery. How can we be there for each other?