What I Said

I was your age, maybe younger, when I started hitting brick walls. Those brick walls were largely my own creation. It took me time to see and admit that.

My parents were no help. In retrospect, and even during my greatest struggles, I wondered how they might have helped me. If they had been so inclined. I know for sure that completely ignoring I had any legitimate or addressable emotional problems was not helpful at all.

This is what I thought they might have done. I thought it would help if they acknowledged they could see I was confused and suffering. I acknowledge that you are confused and suffering.

I also would have found it helpful if they acknowledged they could see through my “grown up” act to the struggling little child I still was within. I see that you are still a hurting and struggling child. Acting all grown up. 

It would have been helpful for me to have one of them say that they would be there for me and would stand by me as I resolved to solve my internal turmoil.

It was poet Alden Nowlan who said: “The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise.”

You are still some distance from adulthood and I grieve that. I also grieve that you carry and disperse so much anger and vitriol to people who love you. 

My mom once said of me that she “loved” me but she didn’t like me much. Truth was, I didn’t much like myself.

I extend my hand if you want to seek help for whatever it is that is going on in you. I learned that the longer we ignore the source of our distress, the bigger it becomes and harder it is to resolve. 

I know you have great ambition but I also know they are unachievable or will quickly fall apart when you are tested (as you will inevitably be) with your level of  emotional turmoil and anger. The world won’t tolerate it. They didn’t tolerate it from me. I know that from hard experience.

I’m here for support if you want to make an honest effort at healing your wounds and repairing your relationships. It is easy to look a gift horse in the mouth until it is too late or ends in disaster. I hope that is not what awaits you. 

What I know now for sure is that I am not the sole source of your grievances and troubled soul. I am just another scapegoat whom you choose to blame. What I had to eventually learn – the hard way – was that I was the common denominator in my fractured life and relationships.

You may find yourself scared or uncertain by times now. Just wait until your emotional bank account is empty and all of your support has fallen or been pushed away and you are left to manage everything all on your own.

That will be a very hard day indeed. Whether I am still on the planet or not.

As always, your choice. 

Screaming Hypocrite

How calm and cool and reasonable was I in the face of the ravaged lot behind our house, I told myself last week? The destroyed view from our backyard. The disturbance of not only our solitude but our peace and quiet. And worse, the upending of our dream. That was the impression I wanted to convey to the world and to myself.

As the story and project have unfolded, the story is textbook irony. I had looked for a more suitable house for us for over a year. We must have looked at 20. Made an offer on a few. But there was always a dealbreaker.

The beautiful wood paneled walls of the three acre country estate with the many fruit trees but maintenance issues and the shredded birdcage around the pool. As we countered back and forth with the seller, I was slowly undone by the amount of work it would take to bring this beautiful property back to life and good health. And it was far too far to drive to amenities for my liking. Pass.

Then there was the country place that was called the “cow house” by our agent. Five acres and a massive, meandering house. Again in need of maintenance and much love. Too much of both were required for our taste. And there were no trees to speak of on the property. A definite dealbreaker.

There was the stunningly decorated “wow” house that t sat directly on a golf course. It had an adorable little lap pool. That deal fell apart over a misunderstanding about whether it was being sold “turnkey” or not. But we learned no furniture or decorations were included, as we initially thought. As tempting as it was, that deal fell through, too.

It is often said in real estate circles that buyers often know they have found “their” house within a few seconds after crossing the threshold. So it was with the house we recently chose. Perfection. For us. Until last week when trees began to fall.

When I wrote about my emotional evenhandedness in the face of lovely old oak trees coming down in front of our eyes and our old forest view being obliterated, I was kidding myself.

I now realize I was in shock. We had no forewarning of what was coming. I kept myself super busy on Friday just to get on the top of the situation and to quell my panic.

That denial fell away this morning when the dozers and chainsaws came back. When they were done, there was a huge hole in the view from our pool where there used to be lush greenery and old trees dripping with Spanish moss. And a pile of leveling dirt. The pain set in with a vengeance.

I am heartsick. And I realize that I am powerless. Except in how I react. And 72 hours later, I am reacting like a very sad and angry little girl. I am full of swear words and useless anger. So much for my great healing journey.

I know “this too shall pass.” Like other sudden losses and disappointments, this pain will lessen and change with time. We have talked to a landscaper to fill in the hole from our side with thick and fast-growing foliage.

So as much as I would like to experience all of life’s insults in a calm, beatific and philosophical evenhanded way, I have to accept I am only human.

It’s a sad and disappointing development. It is not the first time and will not be the last time that life throws me a curveball. I appreciate that it is also not the end of the story.

Best to shore up and fortify those emotional management skills now. Surprising to me is that short-term rage and anger appears to be one of them.

For Charlie

Not my words but words I agree with in every fiber of my being.

Have you ever thought about this?

In 100 years like in 2123 we will all be buried with our relatives and friends.

Strangers will live in our homes we fought so hard to build, and they will own everything we have today. All our possessions will be unknown and unborn, including the car we spent a fortune on, and will probably be scrap, preferably in the hands of an unknown collector.

Our descendants will hardly or hardly know who we were, nor will they remember us. How many of us know our grandfather’s father?

After we die, we will be remembered for a few more years, then we are just a portrait on someone’s bookshelf, and a few years later our history, photos and deeds disappear in history’s oblivion. We won’t even be memories.

If we paused one day to analyze these questions, perhaps we would understand how ignorant and weak the dream to achieve it all was.

If we could only think about this, surely our approaches, our thoughts would change, we would be different people.

Always having more, no time for what’s really valuable in this life. I’d change all this to live and enjoy the walks I’ve never taken, these hugs I didn’t give, these kisses for our children and our loved ones, these jokes we didn’t have time for. Those would certainly be the most beautiful moments to remember, after all they would fill our lives with joy.

And we waste it day after day with greed, greed and intolerance.

Anon

Natural Conclusions

My mother once owned 40 houses. You’d think she (and we, her descendants) would have lived and been as rich as royalty. We weren’t. Not by a long shot.

I came to see it this way. Humans being creatures of habits and all, we tend to get into behavioral grooves as adults. Call them what you will. Rituals. Routines. Habits. They can be a great comfort and source of strength in managing one’s life.

When the rest of the world appears batpoop gaga, those peculiar habits are things we can do for ourselves to assure us – fleetingly – that all is well in our world, if not in “the world.” I often struggle with this. There are things I do repeatedly that I am not convinced are the best use of my time and energy. But damn, they are a comfort.

It used to be said of “ladies” that to steady their nerves or comfort themselves, they might buy a new hat. The “lipstick economy” referred to the odd economic pattern of women buying more lipstick in economic downturns. It was a comfort and vanity they could still easily afford.

My mother epitomized these two phenomena. She had been a real estate broker when she was still married and miserable with my father. That world shattered and dissolved. But in her dotage she circled back around to “house buying” for comfort and distraction.

It had to be those reasons as there didn’t seem to be any major economic game plan, like securing her retirement or passing a substantial inheritance to her children and grandchildren.

I observed that her most frantic and frenetic house-buying activity was in the midst of a Herculean power struggle that she and I were engaged in. The house purchases angered me. For several reasons. The lack of a game plan to start. Who was going to manage and maintain all of these acquisitions, I wondered?

But if I’m honest, I was more angry because my mother’s relentless search and the process of buying houses deflected her energy from coming to any peace or resolution with me. It was like her old addictions to pills and booze which were always more important than I was.

She had a similar deflection strategy at night. I always appreciate the time before sleep as a time to review the day and put my thoughts and priorities in some kind of order. Badly and imperfectly but I at least allow myself that private, quiet time.

Mom slept with every major broadcaster in the industry for years. I should probably phrase that differently. Mom went to bed every night and slept with the radio on, listening to the likes of Larry King or Peter Gzowski and Stuart Maclean reruns or anyone else with the gift of gab.

What that said to me was that she was not comfortable in her own skin and at peace with her own thoughts. She had to cram the words of voices of others into her head so as not to listen to voices she didn’t want to hear. Like mine. It was her habit.

Deflection and distraction only hold up as coping strategies for awhile. If important things in your life are consistently deflected and ignored, there will be a day of reckoning. Hitting the proverbial brick wall as it is colloquially known.

And so that is exactly what happened to Mom and her empire. Low cost houses in poor shape attracted low rents and the renters that went with that scenario. Mom had a perpetual “soft spot” for birds with broken wings. The irony, of course, is that she never did accept and realize that she was a flightless bird herself so rendered by multiple losses and tragedies.

The “do-gooder” dynamic is pervasive and well-known. There are legions of folk out there who help others primarily to feel good and generous and to deflect any suggestion of neediness they might have themselves.

That sounds cynical I realize. I also believe there are genuinely generous and good people out there. There are also plenty of the others.

Mom lost all of the 40 houses. Short sales. Foreclosures. Tax disputes with the authorities which they inevitably won. She shrugged off the losses years later: “They served a purpose at the time.”

Healing her own emotional wounds or those between her and her eldest daughter went by the wayside. Healing between us was not to be. We were in an emotional stalemate at the time of her death. Civil and superficially affectionate. Each of us wary and cautious around the other, playing our assigned roles. We circled each other emotionally and psychologically like two lionesses each wounded by the other in previous battles.

I didn’t have a mother. She didn’t have a daughter. Not in any real way that might have mattered long term that left me awash in tender and loving memories. If we are lucky, even after a antagonist’s death, healing keeps happening. It has to if we are to make sense of what we lived through and why what happened, happened.

I am taking stock of my current habitual distractions and deflections. In that regard, for all my insight and bitching about my mother’s dysfunctional habits, I sometimes realize the apple hasn’t fallen all that far from the tree.

Change Happens

Today I had the kind of day I recently wrote about. I wrote about the Chinese farmer whose stallion ran away. What his neighbors initially thought was very bad news, soon became good news in their eyes. The stallion eventually returned bringing several wild mares with him. The new mares substantially increased the farmer’s wealth.

That story contains a wise lesson about perspective as it demonstrates a back and forth that can happen between “bad news” and “good news.” Is it really one or the other? It depends.

So “bad news” happened to us today. We woke up this morning to the sound of bulldozers and brush being cut nearby. I unraveled inside. The lot beside the lot behind our house was being razed. We only recently bought this house based in large part on the “back forty” behind us which is full of trees and bushes. It is essentially a forest.

The prospect of seeing this forest disappear before we’d even had time to enjoy it caused my stomach to turn and my heart to drop into my stomach. The dream we had for our home and cozy, private surroundings was falling apart before my eyes.

I did what I usually do in a crisis. I went into crisis management mode. “What can I actually control in this situation?” The bush whacking was happening. The trees were coming down. Outside my control.

What was in my control was information gathering. Who was building? What are they building? What is the plan for the “natural forest” in our backyard? My mind was racing. Would it all be ravaged and cut down to make way for a bunch of new houses?

First, I called the county property assessment office. I found out who owned the lot. I researched the adjoining lots. Different owner. Still the distressing niggle: is there a development going in back there?

Then I called the president of our homeowners’ association. What does he know about what is being built there? How could he help? Could he help? Would he help? All big question marks.

I finally found the name of the new owners on the county property assessors website. But no phone number. No email address. Just a street address. About a fifteen minute drive away from here. I jumped in my car and fired up the GPS.

I turned off the main highway and down a twisty road. One more turn and I landed in what I thought was the address I was looking for. No number on the house though. I was initially wary of the dog on the front porch. That was until I saw him wagging his tail so hard I thought he would fall over.

Encouraged, I braved the porch. My hands and legs were promptly and enthusiastically licked nearly to death. By, I later learned, Groot the dog. A love hound if ever there was one.

The nanny who met me at the door confirmed that her employers were indeed the owners of the lot and they were planning to build a house behind our house. Sigh. I gave her my name and address and phone number and email address and what I hoped was a cheerful note to the impending house builders.

Back at home, I comforted myself I had done all I could do and learned all that could for the day. I resigned myself to the uncertainty and started licking my wounds, inspired by Groot.

A couple of hours later, our insipid front door bell rang. (I really must do something about that.) Acting on the note I had left with the nanny, the builder/homeowner came directly to see us at the end of his workday. The stallion brought several mares back with him.

A standup guy. Concerned about some of the same things we are, specifically, taking down trees. Losing the “natural” vibe. We talked mitigation strategies to make up for our compromised view. Vibernum vines. Night-blooming jasmine. He even wants to do extra planting before the building begins. To give it a head start.

We shot the breeze for awhile. Found out where he came from. What his wife does for a living. The names of their two kids. And, of course, I reported on my near-death licking experience with the dog I then learned was known as Groot. His owner grinned. “He’s full of love.”

Look, if I could, I would revert to what we had yesterday. An unfettered view of natural overgrowth and old oak trees. The endless peace and the quiet. But in a nod to the inevitability of change, our new neighbor made all the right and wise moves.

Showing up immediately as he did and being as concerned about as many things as we are went a long way to soothing our distress over the impaired view.

In only a few moments, it felt like a friendship and alliance was made. The day ended much happier than it began. With a minimum of hand-wringing and drama. If change is inevitable, today was a master class for me in how to handle it. I look forward to meeting the mares.

Build on, Macduff!

Stay Open to Mystery

And here I share and thank poet Susan Frybort for this powerful and affecting poem. I believe she is married to writer, Jeff Brown. Strong creative pairing right there.

I am all for writing that explores aging as the stage of wonder and grace it can usher in.

Sure aging is tough on the body. Life is generally tough on the body. And everything else.

Our youth centric, immortality deluded society keeps a very tight lid on aging’s upside. Let’s face it. Impending death (whether 10, 20 or 30 or 40 years in the future) is bad for business.

Our main North American society is painfully arrested in advancing widespread integration of and honoring our elders. We can look to indigenous tribes and many immigrant cultures for much better modeling of how to treat senior citizens.

They are just people after all.

Archaeology for the Woman’s Soul

No one told me

it would be like this—

how growing older

is another passage

of discovery

and that aging is one

grand transformation,

and if some things become torn apart

lost along the way,

many other means show up

to bring me closer

to the center of my heart.

No one ever told me

if whatever wonder

waits ahead

is in another realm

and outside of time.

But the amazement, I found,

is that the disconcerting things

within the here and now

that I stumble

and trip my way

through, also

lead me

gracefully

home.

And no one told me

that I would ever see

an earth so strong

and fragile, or

a world so sad

and beautiful.

And I surely

didn’t know

I’d have

all this life

yet in me

or such fire

inside my

bones.

~Susan Frybort~ With gratitude for this Soul Deep Poem

Soul Seeking Self Succor

Today I went for a drive in the countryside. I don’t do that half often enough.

We live by a forest. It is a blessing. If nature really does contribute to good mental health, then I have it made.

Lately I have come to that point where me and myself need to have a good long talk.

We have been metaphorically burning the midnight oil for weeks – maybe months – now. It is catching up with me.

The signs are subtle. I am losing patience with things that normally don’t bother me. I feel wired like my “on” button is always “on.” I can’t seem to shut it off.

It amuses me that what I wrote about yesterday was the singular focus and tenacity of hammers. Hammers get into a groove where hitting nails is all they know. They keep hitting nails because they are woefully underserved in the intellect department.

I am beginning to feel the same way about myself. Having taken on a project where its outcome is all up to me, I find myself back in familiar emotional and psychological territory.

I think at some point all of my self-esteem must have been tied up in being a finisher. That was such an overriding drive that if there was something offered to me that I didn’t think I could finish or do well, I wouldn’t engage.

That probably saved me from a world of heartache. But I also clipped my wings a little looking back. Fear is a ruthless master.

So I am at that point of burnout where the task is feeling beyond me. At least in the timeframe and to the standard I initially imagined.

Somewhere I read that the world’s shortest prayer is also the simplest: “Fuck it!” Let go of whatever you cannot comfortably handle. Relax. Tall order for a Type A, PTSD-recovering, alcoholic, trauma survivor like me whose entire worth on the planet rests on “accomplishments.”

I think it is time to read a page in my own book and start disengaging from that which has become an anchor more than a mooring. A mooring is a lovely spot to hole up in for a time. An anchor has nowhere to go but down.

So I am heading into a brief period of rest and renewal. I will continue my commitment to this yearlong, daily blog but I am going to find me some workarounds and shortcuts.

I am trying to retire the hair shirt and unceasing mantle of responsibility I have always worn. And, in truth, picked up and put on.

Even “saying” out loud that I am human, life is difficult and I need a break feels like a commendable first step.

Therapy by blog post. Thank you very much.

Are You A Hammer?

“When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

This quote is variously attributed to so many people that I wont attribute it to any. I prefer to play with what the concept might actually mean.

For some, it speaks to the narrow-mindedness of seeing only one use for a particular tool. There is something in there about opposites attracting and seeing something that the other needs. It can be argued that hammers and nails need each other to feel effective in the world.

There is also something in there about sticking to scripts we have internalized and faithfully observe. What we have learned. And in many areas of life, there are absolute “rights” and “wrongs” about how to do things.

Apply those hard-and-fast rules and success will be your reward. I find this particularly comforting when I’m flying. I like knowing that every pilot has been tested and approved by a very stringent set of standards on their skills and competence to fly the airplane.

This quote has also been interpreted to explain cognitive bias. Cognitive bias makes a mockery of so many academic pursuits. But can we apply the same formulae to artists and philosophers? The boundaries are much more blurry in these pursuits. Laws are at work that can best be described as fluid. Creative pursuits are more often informed by culture, zeitgeist, current affairs and spirituality, among others.

I should know. I have a masters in sociology. To this day, studying social groups requires a methodology that is hard to pin down with the traditional “scientific method.” It is more like a smorgasbord of journalism and keeping a diary. Indeed, the term “participant observer” was concocted as a methodology back in the day for what we would now likely call “embedding.”

That sticky bit of intellectual rationalization led to huge disclaimers assuring readers that the sociologists had gone to great lengths to ensure and preserve their objectivity. That strikes me as funny. Along the lines of “methinks the lady doth protest too much.” If sociologists were so sure that their research methods were pure and unsullied, disclaimers would not likely necessary.

As in the example above, it’s good to know that pilots are following a successful flying formula. The gap between engineering and arts has always been huge intellectually. Engineers – like pilots – learn skills based on certain immutable laws and forces. We count on them to do that.

It does seem we all have certain built-in competencies. Maths ability over writing ability is a common example. But when we only stick to what we know and pursue only those areas where we are sure we can excel, growth stops. Without the natural human tendency to explore and keep trying out new ideas, the world would be bereft of innovation.

We often end up balancing two opposing forces in our lives: the comfort of the familiar or the excitement (and danger) of pursuing new challenges. Maturity informs us which path to pick when usually because we have already screwed up in this regard a few times.

And there is always that great X factor: the unknowns of pursuing a particular path and the general uncertainty of the future.

So which are you? A hammer, a nail or something else entirely. Are you locked into stale and outdated ways of thinking and acting that aren’t moving you forward in the direction you want to move? I think about this periodically. I haven’t actually decided which one I am.

Certainly in recent months, I have moved well beyond almost any of my known patterns and ways of being. It’s stressful, for sure, but also satisfying. It has been the price I have had to pay for any new skill, experience, accomplishment or romance in my life.

They didn’t all work out the way I wanted, obviously, but they all expanded my worldview and understanding every single time. That seems like a fair tradeoff for the inherent risks in following unfamiliar paths. I think I’ve learned enough to modulate my chances whatever path I take.

So there’s that.

Straight Up Medicinal

I am sitting in a fine little library in a small Southern town. Uncluttered open space. The unrelenting order of books lined up on book shelves. All at attention. Spines out. Neatly labeled. Looks like the Dewey decimal system from here but I could be wrong.

Big windows look out on local greenery and shrubbery. It is a big room, brightly lit both by sunlight and thoughtfully placed interior ceiling lights.

And it is quiet. So quiet.

So many of us struggle with externally imposed stress and relentless demands to perform and produce in this “modern era.” A library is a place where there are no demands upon you except to keep to yourself, keep your voice down and your clothes on. Generally agreed upon adult behavior.

Looking around a library imparts a clear sense of how much you don’t know and how much you have yet to learn. There are clear limits on what is possible for one human being to learn in one lifetime. I finally and reluctantly accepted that.

I had a crisis of faith midway through graduate school. Granted I was still very young. But I realized nothing I researched and wrote about in a thesis would add more than an iota of knowledge to all of the accumulated knowledge already available in the world. An atom’s worth at most.

Pretty piddly payoff.

The secret to studying something successfully for a long period of time is passion. You need to be pretty sure that the learning path you embark upon is going to to be just as fascinating to you years from now as it is now. And how would you know that? Well, there’s the rub. You likely won’t.

So much of life is coming upon something, sizing it up based on what we presently know and need, deciding whether or not that opportunity/experience/job/lover will fulfill our current needs and moving forward or back having considered all those things.

I’ve learned that passion sustains itself if it engages your heart and soul and not just your head. If you end up making a decision in any important areas – opportunity/experience/job/lover – using your head over your heart, the outcome isn’t likely to be all that gratifying or sustainable.

I should know. I used to make that mistake consistently. A job was likely to be a lot of fun? Oh no. Couldn’t take that job as it would be too frivolous. A job that would stretch my intellectual limits but had uncertain long-term prospects? Oh heavens no. I needed a steady, nine-to-five job with a predictable work schedule and future.

To my point and chagrin looking back, I remember a conversation with Carol Off, longtime host of the CBC Radio program As It Happens. She talked about a short-term contract she was offered and how she was looking forward to it and all that (her first season on-air with the national daily current affairs program).

I told her I would never be comfortable working like that and needed to find a “real job.” What a putz I was. I never ended up finding that “secure” job. To start, it turned out I hated the “predictability” of a nine-to-five job. I had more entrepreneurial spirit than I would own up to. I was looking for guidance from others and a “sure thing” for far too long into adulthood.

And as it turned out, I got a loathsome 9 – 5 government job. Carol Off went on to become a much respected, award winning multi-year national CBC radio host who kept working from contract to contract. So much for “real jobs.”

Happily, career angst was low on the list of neuroses I had to deal with. In the end, I worked. I made enough money to keep body and soul together. It “worked out.”

And all that I lived up until now led me to this beautiful little library where I am sitting today. In my working days, the library’s unflappable atmosphere of calm and order might well have driven me round the bend. Nowhere near exciting enough. Today I experience it as a tonic for the senses and the nerves.

Libraries never were designed to be social hotspots. They are designed for people who are comfortable with their own thoughts and self-directed intellectual pursuits. And little kids. Libraries are great for little kids with the right programs and activities and boundless learning opportunities.

Things I once mocked for what they weren’t and didn’t offer have now come full circle in my head. Libraries are oases of sanity and peace if you are inclined to appreciate that. Life is inherently risky and unstable. But if you have the courage to believe and follow your own instincts, you may end up where you wanted to be anyway.

Carol Off might agree with me if I met up with her now. The hell with security. Take the contract and run. You might just get a chance to learn what you are really capable of. Hindsight it is said, is always 20/20.

On Being Boring

I used to claim I never get bored. It is still mostly true. I am a learning junkie.

Lately, I have hit a plateau where I know exactly how much I don’t know. And I’m okay with that.

Boring has always struck me as a type of laziness. The world is far too vast and interesting and diverse to never have something to explore. For awhile.

I traveled extensively internationally and within North America. Traveling has the advantage that if boredom does hit, you likely have a lot of options to occupy your time. Museums. Art galleries. Sidewalk cafes. Restaurants. People watching.

Lately my learning journey has turned more inward. I feel myself swinging toward slowing down and more deliberate learning. A harvest of sorts.

My interest is spending more time deepening what I already know. As has happened so many times in my life, the exact words came along that capture this feeling.

Poet Wendy Cope pretty much captures how I’m feeling these days. Being boring ain’t so bad.

Being Boring

by Wendy Cope
Wendy Cope

‘May you live in interesting times,’ Chinese curse

“If you ask me ‘What’s new?’, I have nothing to say
Except that the garden is growing.
I had a slight cold but it’s better today.
I’m content with the way things are going.
Yes, he is the same as he usually is,
Still eating and sleeping and snoring.
I get on with my work. He gets on with his.
I know this is all very boring.

There was drama enough in my turbulent past:
Tears of passion-I’ve used up a tankful.
No news is good news, and long may it last.
If nothing much happens, I’m thankful.
A happier cabbage you never did see,
My vegetable spirits are soaring.
If you’re after excitement, steer well clear of me.
I want to go on being boring.

I don’t go to parties. Well, what are they for,
If you don’t need to find a new lover?
You drink and you listen and drink a bit more
And you take the next day to recover.
Someone to stay home with was all my desire
And, now that I’ve found a safe mooring,
I’ve just one ambition in life: I aspire
To go on and on being boring.