Morning Mood

I woke up feeling a lot of grief this morning.

I felt a lot of grief last night, too. When I sat down to watch Inception, I was filled with tremendous emotion. An overpowering sadness. The movie did its job in distracting me for a while, but of course the feeling remained afterward.

Later I took a walk to a park near my house. I walk pretty briskly when I'm getting somewhere, but I decided to saunter kind of slowly once I hit the green. I decided to walk a slow loop and think about things. I crossed my arms. Slowly I began to notice how I was looking at things, how I was playing this subtle, subtle game with my feelings and surroundings, as if I'm making tiny, minute projections on to everything I see. Painting over the concrete and benches and trees with my feelings (baggage). And I noticed how I've done this before: this is a game I haven't played in, well, about 3 years.

I feel overwhelmed and disconcerted and a bit distressed right now, but at least it's clear that this is not new; this is something I have dealt with before. It's just a little discouraging to know that I've let myself slip back into this space.

What is it, exactly? On the surface it's the "pining for unrequited love" feeling. I can at least credit myself with understanding that it goes deeper than this; that if I frame it this way, "if only she loves me, all will be well," nothing will improve, I will only sink deeper. Of course, I am not going to all to arms right away. As is normal for me now, I simply watch passively when I start into destructive behavior. But I take it a few grains less seriously than I used to, which is good.

Deeper it's a lot of other things. Or maybe one big thing that I perceive as a many-armed monstrosity. It's the whole lack of faith in myself thing. Feeling incomplete, feeling like a piece of a person. Sometimes that is portrayed as being noble and romantic (as in the movie last night: "Do you know what it's like to be a lover? A half of a whole?"), but these days it seems parasitic to me.

It does, in fact, feel like an addiction.

I wish I could frame it accurately, so I can observe it properly. My sense right now is that it has to do with feelings as content, not just as a context. I get hooked on a feeling being around people. In this situation, there is a memory of a past feeling that was very solid, very good. I felt very empowered. Am I trying to return to that high? Have I defined this person as a "fix"? It seems so. It saddens me that this is how I am right now, but I need to observe it. Keep watching it. Remind myself that this is what I'm doing. Remind myself that as long as I keep framing it this way, that this is someone I need to be happy with myself, the worse it's going to get.

(Is that what being happy really means, being happy with yourself? Or at least, not hating yourself? Is that what everyone in this world, or at least this culture I find myself in, is after, and is so terrible at reaching?)

I need to end, but before I end I want to acknowledge that a lot of what I'm feeling right now has to be fall out from breaking up with Alexa. Unexpected desperation, grief, frustration, self-doubt, within weeks of an intense and distressing break-up, appearing at random? Of course not. This is emotion I need to feel right now. The timing is just a little late. The way it seems to be emerging objectively doesn't entirely match up, but I don't think this really matters. It's natural and normal and necessary. One way to look at it is that I am, in fact, reacting to the situation right now in some way, but this recent break-up stuff, and all the attached deep, dark primitive stuff that it brings with it, has commandeered this relatively smaller thing.

Anyway, it's not hopeless; I know what to do; I can look at this for what it is.

Steps to Growth

Here is my summary of Jose Stevens' discussion of how to end destructive patterns in your life:

1. Be completely, tirelessly aware of the delusion of the pattern.
2. Accept complete responsibility for it.
3. Work to identify with the parts of yourself you are most estranged from.
4. Be present.
5. Play.
6. Be prepared to take huge risks / make huge changes when the opportunity arises.
7. Never stop working. The path is the goal.

I think he nailed this one. This sounds about right to me.

Here's the link:
Freeing Entrapping Patterns

Blogging Doesn't Suit Me Very Well

But I feel like continuing anyway.

I am feeling a lot of tension in my life. Reading Christopher Alexander's "The Timeless Way of Being," plus all the Zen stuff I read/do, helps keep this in focus. I am a tense person, and I feel a lot of tension in all that I do. There is always somewhere I need to be that is not here, always someone I need to be with who is out of reach, someone I am with who is holding me back. Push, pull. Tug, tug.

I have a very calm demeanor. When life is chopped into bite-sized chunks, I am entirely calm. I have a very stressful job, and I manage to remain calm most of the time in the context of all the little emergencies that pop up where I work. I usually remain calm when faced with loss of property, more than most people. Other things.

But, as my recently ex-girlfriend pointed out once, I am fundamentally a tense person. I think a lot of my calmness on the outside is a kind of compensation for how unsettled I am inside. And to the extent this is true, the calmness is false.

Not to rag on myself too much, though. I am what I am what I am. I think the important thing to point out is, yes, I can be a calm presence for some people, in some situations, but that I really owe it to myself to find some balance on the inside...

And here come the doubts. Why is balance necessary? Why choose balance over chaos? Why not just be imbalanced, diseased, immoral, whatever? It will be painful for myself and others, but who am I to decide that pain is bad and should be replaced by comfort? "Avoidable" awkwardness and imbalance and evil are just as much a part of the universe as anything else. I am obsessed with these questions. I am never going to balance my inner forces if I make so much room for these doubts.

But how to address them?

The best answer I have come up with to this issue is that there is no answer to the question. The best I can do is tell myself, again and again, "There is nothing in the universe to convince you otherwise. Yet you still feel it ought to be otherwise."

I think the issue is that I look at will and choice and responsibility as something far more mechanistic, gears and axles, than it should be. No, there is nothing outside of myself that can make me choose a good action over a senseless, destructive one. Nothing.

In the end, I see that I have little faith in myself and a dim grasp of my feelings, which are not necessarily two different things.

I've been spending a lot of time sitting around pining for a new woman to be around. Really, I ought not to date anyone. I see this clearly in some moments, but most of the time it gets shoved aside by a facile need to be around someone. Like an addiction. There are little kernels of genuine loneliness, genuine need for company, genuine attraction to certain people around me, but so much of it is a bloated sense of need, that if I just "have" this person (whatever that means) I won't feel lonely or powerless anymore. It's projection of power, of self esteem. Founded in my lack of faith in myself. Could a relationship turn out well, founded on this? Not really, since I think this is real, genuine relationship destroying activity.

Here I am; besieged by my own poor ability to adapt to situations; feeling less like a bird fending off invaders to its nest; much more like an apple who can't help but hang around and be eaten by a worm.

Life is something deeper than all of this. I need to pinpoint this pessimism at the base of my being; examine it, claim it, understand it. This means I will be sounding pretty gloomy for a little while...