and, again, a long time between posts
Mar. 8th, 2024 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerI spent some time outside tonight, smoking and thinking. Not enough of the thinking has stayed in my head, what with doing cat stuff and shifting laundry. Also, I realise, I have a tendency to swing from periods of contemplation, in which I make all kinds of marvelous plans and decisions and then veer into periods of lassitude, where all the ideas I came up with feel too massive and too difficult to implement.
I *like* making plans. I enjoy coming up with deep insights and trying to come to momentous conclusions about what I should do with my life. I suspect that some of these, maybe all of them, are overblown and grandiose, leading me to make pompous pronouncements or build castles in the sky (châteaux des hirondelles, a phrase I love but, according to Google, have imagined--apparently in French the expression is, more mundanely, châteaux en Espagne).
I'm also crushed and depressed when things I want to achieve, or simply want to have, are beyond my reach. I've been obsessed for over a decade with the idea of moving to (as I think of it, perhaps not accurately, back to) New England. This seems to me now quite impossible. I can't find the income to sustain our standard of living. Even if I could, we can't afford to live the places we want to. The more I look for specific places to live, none of them seem right for us, or even what I think I'm looking for.
Part of the problem is my admittedly excellent imagination. What it devises, what I feel as if I'm trying to return to, the images that full the place that seems like "home" in may heart, are too much creations of memory, combinations of places, times, people that don't exist, maybe never existed, a pastiche of hopes and dreams.
The wonderful therapist I see has a very Buddhist attitude towards life. (I'm fairly sure he is, actually, a Buddhist *smile*). A little of that rubs off on me over time, though the totality of it is too much for me to take in at once. I love parts of religions and philosophies, but I always seem to find things that are just a bit too far for me to go. So I've been a Christian (several times), and Jew, and a Unitarian Universalist, and would probably try being a Muslim if I could learn enough Arabic, but there's always some stumbling block that asks more of me than I can commit.
But one of the whisps of idea that floated through my brain and back out again with the tobacco smoke tonight was that I'm too focused on desire--my desire for these imaginary things and places, for being a person that I'm not. I need to focus more on being who I am, and finding ways to explore who I am that will bring me closer to those imaginings while I'm right here being myself. (See, I can't be a good Buddhist and just give up on the desire entirely--there's always that one step too far.)
But this will take work. Especially, it will take lots of work to break out of the cage I've built around myself. Something small and not very meaningful has lurked within me all my life, a sort of introversion, a dislike of bother, an inclination toward inaction and keeping to myself. I know that when I step outside my bubble of comfort and familiarity and solitude, I can find tremendous fun and fulfilment and other people who can share all sorts of joy with me in many different ways. But it's SO hard and SO disturbing that staying in my hobbit hole, while it doesn't bring me all the good stuff, feels SAFE. It's not as fulfilling but it's not as demanding. But if I want to be happier, I need to find ways to persuade myself to open my borders just a bit more often. To step out the door. To make the effort, to grit my teeth and ... have fun.
As the wise mystics of Avenue Q put it, "There's life outside your apartment/But you've got to open the door!"
I *like* making plans. I enjoy coming up with deep insights and trying to come to momentous conclusions about what I should do with my life. I suspect that some of these, maybe all of them, are overblown and grandiose, leading me to make pompous pronouncements or build castles in the sky (châteaux des hirondelles, a phrase I love but, according to Google, have imagined--apparently in French the expression is, more mundanely, châteaux en Espagne).
I'm also crushed and depressed when things I want to achieve, or simply want to have, are beyond my reach. I've been obsessed for over a decade with the idea of moving to (as I think of it, perhaps not accurately, back to) New England. This seems to me now quite impossible. I can't find the income to sustain our standard of living. Even if I could, we can't afford to live the places we want to. The more I look for specific places to live, none of them seem right for us, or even what I think I'm looking for.
Part of the problem is my admittedly excellent imagination. What it devises, what I feel as if I'm trying to return to, the images that full the place that seems like "home" in may heart, are too much creations of memory, combinations of places, times, people that don't exist, maybe never existed, a pastiche of hopes and dreams.
The wonderful therapist I see has a very Buddhist attitude towards life. (I'm fairly sure he is, actually, a Buddhist *smile*). A little of that rubs off on me over time, though the totality of it is too much for me to take in at once. I love parts of religions and philosophies, but I always seem to find things that are just a bit too far for me to go. So I've been a Christian (several times), and Jew, and a Unitarian Universalist, and would probably try being a Muslim if I could learn enough Arabic, but there's always some stumbling block that asks more of me than I can commit.
But one of the whisps of idea that floated through my brain and back out again with the tobacco smoke tonight was that I'm too focused on desire--my desire for these imaginary things and places, for being a person that I'm not. I need to focus more on being who I am, and finding ways to explore who I am that will bring me closer to those imaginings while I'm right here being myself. (See, I can't be a good Buddhist and just give up on the desire entirely--there's always that one step too far.)
But this will take work. Especially, it will take lots of work to break out of the cage I've built around myself. Something small and not very meaningful has lurked within me all my life, a sort of introversion, a dislike of bother, an inclination toward inaction and keeping to myself. I know that when I step outside my bubble of comfort and familiarity and solitude, I can find tremendous fun and fulfilment and other people who can share all sorts of joy with me in many different ways. But it's SO hard and SO disturbing that staying in my hobbit hole, while it doesn't bring me all the good stuff, feels SAFE. It's not as fulfilling but it's not as demanding. But if I want to be happier, I need to find ways to persuade myself to open my borders just a bit more often. To step out the door. To make the effort, to grit my teeth and ... have fun.
As the wise mystics of Avenue Q put it, "There's life outside your apartment/But you've got to open the door!"
