Thoughts

I wish that I could write as I think I once did.  At least I believe I wrote moderately well. 

My heart has much to say, but the part of me that put words and phrases together, the brain, does not perform its task quite as fluently these days. 

For the most part, since it is my heart that desires to speak, it usually centers on some aspect of love.  That feels like an irony for me.  I have a very deep sense of love and caring, yet I realize that I often do not let it show by the way I act.  Indeed, I realize a selfishness in my love.  It is too often, somewhat unconsciously, directed toward my own interests.  How I care for others is not diminished, yet because my actions often fall short of adequate expression, I feel I am in fact leaving them alone and uncared for.

These thoughts tumbled from my heart just now as I was reading Maria Popova’s latest post in her newsletter, “Brain Pickings.” The article shared thoughts from poet/philosopher David Whyte about friendship, love and heartbreak. [1] While most of us tend to view these as separate feelings, he brings them together as one pathway in life. Heartbreak seems the most devastating of the three elements.  So much pain oozes from it for those immersed in it.

Ms. Popova introduces Whyte’s thoughts thusly:

“Stripped of the unnecessary negative judgments we impose upon it, heartbreak is simply a fathometer for the depth of our desire — for a person, for an accomplishment, for belonging to the world and its various strata of satisfaction. Whyte captures this elegantly:”

Realizing its inescapable nature, we can see heartbreak not as the end of the road or the cessation of hope but as the close embrace of the essence of what we have wanted or are about to lose.

[…]

Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something and someone that has been with us all along, asking us to be ready for the ultimate letting go.

It would seem that to love we are inviting heartbreak, this disappointment and frustration that comes when we feel unfulfilled, when we appear to lose what we once had.  How can we reconcile this apparent loss?  For me, my experience of loss is considering the “what ifs” of life.  What if I had only done this?  What if I had not acted this way? What if I had chosen differently? What if I loved regardless of eventual outcomes?

I have not yet answered the questions.  I am certain there are possible answers, solutions, ways to act.

What if I could write as I once did?

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[1] https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/04/29/david-whyte-consolations-words/?mc_cid=1047338dc7&mc_eid=b032a5ca74

Living Without Feeling

As I read an email newsletter centered on powerful writings by authors daring to deal with life's most complex issues, I could not help but think how important feelings are to being fully alive. [1]

Among several topics in the current article was one focused upon Elizabeth Gilbert writing about “Love, Loss, and How to Move Through Grief As Grief Moves Through You."  Who has not experienced grief at some point in their life?  Sometimes, many of us find ourselves re-experiencing moments of grief over a loss that occurred a long time ago.  This happened for me as I read along.  I first thought about my daughter, Jennifer, and her loss of her mother almost two years ago.  The pain still runs deep for her due to the closeness of their relationship.  My thoughts turned to the passing of my mother, an experience that is as clear to me in this moment as it was in 2002.

My mind found itself considering what life must be like for those who appear to have no feelings, people who seem to coast along living in the moment without regard to a history of connections or a future of discovery.  Several people I know, as far as I can tell, would fit this description.  They are not bad people because they do not seem to feel things as I do.  Yet I feel they have a different type of loss, a life not quite as colorful as it might be.  Understand, I am not saying that sadness is required for us to have color in our lives.  It is, however, important to realize the strengths and character that are built by our ability to face loss in such a way as to allow moving through it with grace and depth of meaning.  In short, if we are feeling loss it is because whatever, whoever has been “lost” was and is important to us.

In this article Joan Didion was quoted as saying, “Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be." Gilbert reflects on the death of her partner, Rayya Elias . . . the love of her life.

“Grief… happens upon you, it’s bigger than you. There is a humility that you have to step into, where you surrender to being moved through the landscape of grief by grief itself. And it has its own timeframe, it has its own itinerary with you, it has its own power over you, and it will come when it comes. And when it comes, it’s a bow-down. It’s a carve-out. And it comes when it wants to, and it carves you out — it comes in the middle of the night, comes in the middle of the day, comes in the middle of a meeting, comes in the middle of a meal. It arrives — it’s this tremendously forceful arrival and it cannot be resisted without you suffering more… The posture that you take is you hit your knees in absolute humility and you let it rock you until it is done with you. And it will be done with you, eventually. And when it is done, it will leave. But to stiffen, to resist, and to fight it is to hurt yourself.”

When my father passed in 1981 the news arrived by telephone while my son and daughter and I were having dinner with a friend in Denver.  Loss comes in its own time.  There really is no being ready for it.  Perhaps that reason above all is why it is so important that we allow ourselves to be feeling individuals.  Feeling allows us to be resilient and able to bend in the winds of stress and change.

Gilbert continues, 

“There’s this tremendous psychological and spiritual challenge to relax in the awesome power of it until it has gone through you. Grief is a full-body experience. It takes over your entire body — it’s not a disease of the mind. It’s something that impacts you at the physical level… I feel that it has a tremendous relationship to love: First of all, as they say, it’s the price you pay for love. But, secondly, in the moments of my life when I have fallen in love, I have just as little power over it as I do in grief. There are certain things that happen to you as a human being that you cannot control or command, that will come to you at really inconvenient times, and where you have to bow in the human humility to the fact that there’s something running through you that’s bigger than you.”

Finally, a thought about people who may consider it a weakness to express feelings.  Dads used to teach their sons, “Men don’t cry.”  Hopefully, that is not being taught any longer.  Our emotions are not always accompanied by tears, but when they are, it may be that extra step we allow ourselves that frees us to relax into a more satisfying understanding of the love that embraces what appears to be lost.  Living without feeling is not really living at all.

I am always glad to receive my Sunday digest of “Brain Pickings,” edited by Maria Popova.  Each week there is something to take me more deeply into my understanding of self.  Check it out after reading the footnoted post. [2]

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[1] https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/10/17/elizabeth-gilbert-ted-podcast-love-loss/?mc_cid=a95d120d89&mc_eid=b032a5ca74

[2] https://www.brainpickings.org

Damn! It Has Happened Again

In the years I have been writing I probably have had one hundred first lines pop into my head.  Maybe two lines.  On rare occasions a whole concept emerges.

It happens like this.  I am sitting watching the news or a favorite TV show or reading a book.  Something triggers a thought and I know I have to write that down.  But first, I have to finish whatever it is I am doing.  Then it happens.  The first line is either gone or the story that was supposed to follow it doesn’t materialize as I hoped it would.

Well, here I am again with a first line.  No, I’m sorry.  That first line disappeared and I am stuck with the one you see at the head of this article. Damn!  It has happened again.  This time, however, I decided to go ahead and see if starting to write would reproduce the “creative” urge that first struck my consciousness just a short while ago.

What follows may turn out to be the ramblings of an aging person who cannot string even a few words together into a meaningful sentence, or if I am lucky, I may actually tell you what is on my mind.  Let’s see what happens next.

Every story has a beginning, a middle and an ending.  Without those three elements it is unlikely that what is written or told will make much sense.

Here is a beginning.

What I am generally feeling when the urge to write strikes is a connection or a lack of connection where I feel one should exist.  It may be about a person, an idea or an experience.  It surges up within me as strong emotions that are difficult describe, but clearly understood within my being.  I think one of the articles I have written in the past that most closely approximates those feelings was after I had watched the annual Kennedy Honors Program in 2006.  I wrote about the experience in my book, Moments.  After hearing the story of each of the honorees, I had almost indescribable feelings of love flood my whole being.  I felt a closeness, not only to the characterization of those being honored, but to my family members and friends whom I have loved through the years and the experiences we shared.  The connection was beyond my ability to put into words as clearly as I felt it.

For some, love is easy to understand.  It is something that is just there.  No explanations are needed and no qualifications are required.  Love is!  For others love may represent the toughest of times.  It may surround a loss of some kind.  It may seem unrequited, unfulfilled.  And for yet others there may be the tragedy of being so bound to another person that unbelievable abuse is tolerated until one somehow breaks free.  I know that not everyone will see these as examples of love, but for the person so involved at that particular time with their particular state of being, that may be all they know.

Here is the middle.

I have experienced many levels of love and loss.  I know I am not the only one who has. They have produced impressions on the slate of my soul that are like the certificates of accomplishment of a job well done or the scars of some abuse.  In all honesty I have to admit to recognizing the scars of some form of abuse, mostly those I have been responsible for inflicting, more than any supposed certificates of merit.  There are heavy emotions associated with those events.  I am sure the depth of the emotions has much to do with the fact that the experiences behind them are unresolved, unfinished.  What else could be the reason that they surface so emphatically that they sometimes bring tears to my eyes when they happen? 

I can hear someone out there saying, “For heaven’s sake, man, get a life!  Get over it.”  I hear you.  I know some of the many ways in which one could bind together these unraveled ends of life events and “get over it.”  After all, I have spent most of my life dealing with, exploring, using and enjoying a philosophy of life that seemed to bring results that satisfied.  Then the story line was interrupted and I have not yet been able to reconstruct the point at which the fabric of my life began to unravel.  So the healing has not come forth.  Worse than that, there are times I really don’t care.

This is where the ending should occur.

This is where I should be telling you how I worked everything out and remembered what was so important in the first place.  At the beginning of this article I said,  “I decided to go ahead and see if starting to write would reproduce the ‘creative’ urge that first struck my consciousness just a short while ago.”  Well, I never quite got back to where I thought I wanted to go.  The emotional content seemed to evaporate like a wisp of smoke.   Sometimes life is like that.  You think you are heading toward point A and somewhere along the path you change directions and are heading for point B without knowing if that is really where you intended or wanted to go.  There is a point C in the offing.  If I choose to head there, will it be where I hoped to go? 

As you may note, I have not succeeded in explaining, at least to my satisfaction, the emergence of the “connecting/disconnecting” emotions.  Such events will continue to come, I am certain, and I will continue to experience and attempt to understand them.  When the opening sentence, or paragraph, presents itself I will offer it an opportunity to take fuller form.  In the meantime . . .