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Miscellaneous Monday
Soothing Sunday slipped away silently. Monday started with an explosion. Children who were being much too silly for a Monday morning were soon yelling charges of injustice at their sleepy parents. Apparently, having your children fold laundry is a heinous act of war. It turns them into "slaves." Storming off to their rooms to cool down, the laundry lay in an all too familiar pattern of disarray. Some days they don't really have a clue no matter how certain they are that they have.
I have an idea how they feel. I was young once. I was a girl at war. Today, I also know that in the larger world outside the boundaries of their own heads reality awaits them. It will bite with sharp teeth some day soon. They don't know that most of us are at war with something.
Against this backdrop of battle, angst, chaos, yelling and charges of enslavement, I have to face the emotional fallout that another birthday brings. I am at war with age. I escape the house, the angst, the battle to wage one of my own. Tomorrow I'll be 53. Where did the years go? I wanted to grow old gracefully. I didn't want to mourn the passage of youth. I wanted to celebrate each gray hair and arthritic ache. Instead, the person I see in the mirror is a stranger. This stranger frightens me with her wrinkled brow and dour expression. She isn't much fun at all. She can't appreciate her childrens' early morning silliness. She just wants the noise to stop. She's a woman at war. She is no longer a girl.
Any yet, some where inside the girl still lives. She plays foolish games before heaven. She charges into battle on a steed made of hope and causes. Her eyes crackle with desire. She is on fire. This girl is so far away. Or is she?
I think of my children. In their angry faces, I catch a glimpse of my own. I want to swoop them up in a giant hug and wish their angst away. They are just trying to define themselves. They struggle to figure out who they are. How can they know that this is something that their parents still work at every day?
The girl has disappeared again. The older woman remembers the stranger's face she saw in the mirror just this morning. Everyday is a new opportunity to figure out who we are. I can spend the day getting to know the stranger in the morning mirror or I can spend the day battling change, the inevitable march of time, the thousands of little deaths and rebirths that find us every day. I am weary of the war. I am ready to make peace with that which can not be changed.
The time for my body to be young has come and gone. Age does bring some benefits. I make a list of things that age has taught me.
*Cooperation is sweeter than victory..
*Picking one's battles makes all the difference.
*Admitting that one is wrong is a courageous thing to do.
*Knowing why there are rules and being able to see to the truth beyond them.
*Knowing when to break the rules and when to keep them.
*Understanding that being kind is often more important than being right.
*Making peace with fear makes all the difference.
*Life is fragile and much stronger than one can imagine.
*Paradox moves us forward. I makes the world go 'round and keeps the stars in the heavens. Invite paradox in. Embrace it. Learn from it and then send it on its way.
*Endings and beginnings are not really all that different from each other.
*Each day brings promise.
I am at war no longer. It's time to go home and comfort the troops.
Showing posts with label Bittersweet Paradox. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bittersweet Paradox. Show all posts
Monday, August 15, 2011
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Sharing the Bittersweet Paradox
Lately, I've felt like I've been walking a tightrope between hope and despair. Part of me wants to be strong for strength's sake. Loved ones depend upon me. I depend upon myself. The weary part of me wants to give up. It is drawn into a litany of "what ifs" and "I'm not good enough." In the bottom of a well, I look up for signs of life above me. I see nothing.
Thankfully, perceptions are not always accurate. Feelings sometimes lie. This morning, I opened up one of the many books I drag home from the library. I'm a book glutton, always looking for more. Yet, in my silly gluttony, words often jump off the page at just the right moment. This seems less coincidence and more of a message sent just to me.
This is what I read this morning in the book: The Exquisite Risk by Mark Nepo.
"One of the great difficulties in our human journey is our struggle to withstand and penetrate the nature of [this] paradox. So often, we fall to one side or the other, spending much of our energy either trying to avoid our suffering or being trapped in it. When avoiding our suffering, we enter the colder realms of numbness and addiction. When trapped within the labyrinth of our pain, we are subject to reenact the tensions of our suffering over and over. In this struggle, not just to endure our suffering but to penetrate it, we can so easily slip from facing life and become actors in the drama of our bleeding, running from what pains us or constantly reliving it. For sure, we all experience both the avoidance and the reliving, yet, when blessed, we're able to drop below our pain and our avoidance of it, and briefly taste the joy at sorrow at once. Moments like this give us a glimpse of the underlying freshness from which all feelings get their power.
It was Carl Jung who said, "Neurosis is the substitute for legitimate suffering" What I think he means is that we tend to occupy ourselves with worrisome activities and preoccupations in order to divert ourselves from the necessary task of feeling what is ours alone to feel. Rather than feel our loneliness, we run nakedly to strangers. Rather than feel the brunt of being abandoned , we will construct excuse after excuse to reframe the relationship. Rather than feel our sadness and disappointment, we will replay the event to ourselves and other like a film with no ending. It is this cultivation of neurosis and all its scripts that feeds the drama of our bleeding" (Nepo p. 34)
These words cut straight to my heart. My heart understood what my mind had forgotten. In that moment, I decided to sit quietly and wait for hope and despair to meet. Restlessness left me. Gone was the desire to run from my feelings. My mind has expected to face unbearable pain. The pain that filled the space was mine and mine alone. It was bittersweet and tolerable. One side pain, one side peace, satisfaction, hope; they existed side by side within. I sat with the silence and then got up to start my day aware of this exquisite paradox that I am, that we all are.
Words have not come easily lately. I wanted to write something upbeat, funny, inspiring, helpful. Instead, I feel like an empty void. It's hard to be funny when you're feeling sad. I wanted to be rescued from my life. I wanted to run from the cold hard reality of losing our home, of expecting not to have a job much longer, of not being to provide adequately for my family, from all the disappointments and aftershocks of misfortune.
It is a heavy load to carry. As much as I try to reframe my experience and wring some thing positive from it, there are times when circumstance warrants sadness. As much as I try to soldier on, the truth is sometimes it's really hard. Sometimes, I feel very sad about all that has happened and will happen. Unfortunately, I have swung back and forth between denial and painful rumination. It hasn't been helpful.
What seems to be most helpful is to simply admit it. To sit with the feelings and let them tell me what they've come to say and then to honestly share them. The sharing helps me make sense out of what seems senseless. In between the feelings falling onto the page, a faint picture begins to emerge. If I remain patient, honest and open, I begin to glimpse something wonderful hiding behind the sadness. Together they make up the fabric of life, of my life.
Thankfully, perceptions are not always accurate. Feelings sometimes lie. This morning, I opened up one of the many books I drag home from the library. I'm a book glutton, always looking for more. Yet, in my silly gluttony, words often jump off the page at just the right moment. This seems less coincidence and more of a message sent just to me.
This is what I read this morning in the book: The Exquisite Risk by Mark Nepo.
"One of the great difficulties in our human journey is our struggle to withstand and penetrate the nature of [this] paradox. So often, we fall to one side or the other, spending much of our energy either trying to avoid our suffering or being trapped in it. When avoiding our suffering, we enter the colder realms of numbness and addiction. When trapped within the labyrinth of our pain, we are subject to reenact the tensions of our suffering over and over. In this struggle, not just to endure our suffering but to penetrate it, we can so easily slip from facing life and become actors in the drama of our bleeding, running from what pains us or constantly reliving it. For sure, we all experience both the avoidance and the reliving, yet, when blessed, we're able to drop below our pain and our avoidance of it, and briefly taste the joy at sorrow at once. Moments like this give us a glimpse of the underlying freshness from which all feelings get their power.
It was Carl Jung who said, "Neurosis is the substitute for legitimate suffering" What I think he means is that we tend to occupy ourselves with worrisome activities and preoccupations in order to divert ourselves from the necessary task of feeling what is ours alone to feel. Rather than feel our loneliness, we run nakedly to strangers. Rather than feel the brunt of being abandoned , we will construct excuse after excuse to reframe the relationship. Rather than feel our sadness and disappointment, we will replay the event to ourselves and other like a film with no ending. It is this cultivation of neurosis and all its scripts that feeds the drama of our bleeding" (Nepo p. 34)
These words cut straight to my heart. My heart understood what my mind had forgotten. In that moment, I decided to sit quietly and wait for hope and despair to meet. Restlessness left me. Gone was the desire to run from my feelings. My mind has expected to face unbearable pain. The pain that filled the space was mine and mine alone. It was bittersweet and tolerable. One side pain, one side peace, satisfaction, hope; they existed side by side within. I sat with the silence and then got up to start my day aware of this exquisite paradox that I am, that we all are.
Words have not come easily lately. I wanted to write something upbeat, funny, inspiring, helpful. Instead, I feel like an empty void. It's hard to be funny when you're feeling sad. I wanted to be rescued from my life. I wanted to run from the cold hard reality of losing our home, of expecting not to have a job much longer, of not being to provide adequately for my family, from all the disappointments and aftershocks of misfortune.
It is a heavy load to carry. As much as I try to reframe my experience and wring some thing positive from it, there are times when circumstance warrants sadness. As much as I try to soldier on, the truth is sometimes it's really hard. Sometimes, I feel very sad about all that has happened and will happen. Unfortunately, I have swung back and forth between denial and painful rumination. It hasn't been helpful.
What seems to be most helpful is to simply admit it. To sit with the feelings and let them tell me what they've come to say and then to honestly share them. The sharing helps me make sense out of what seems senseless. In between the feelings falling onto the page, a faint picture begins to emerge. If I remain patient, honest and open, I begin to glimpse something wonderful hiding behind the sadness. Together they make up the fabric of life, of my life.
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