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...