Lives of Quiet Desperation

When you are a child you think: "When I grow up, it'll all be different." As a young adult, you think: "In a few more years, I'll get it together." In your mid thirties - you are still hopeful: "When I get the raise, when I find true love, when X finally happens... it will all fall into place."

We always believe, that with just a little more time - a little more work, we are going to finally "Get it together." All we need is more time, all we need is more wisdom, we just got to stick to our diet and follow our exercise plan - and freedom will be right around the corner.

This is not to say that we cannot elevate our life through conscious endeavor, that we cannot change, transform, or grow. The problem is that we believe that change comes from someplace outside... that we will have what we seek when things change. Things do not change - we change. Furthermore, we tend to seek an illusion - something that not only cannot be had, but should not be sought - not, in any case, head on.

"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing it is not fish they are after.”
Henry David Thoreau

What is it we are all looking for? A pain and trouble free life, an escape from suffering, to be different than what and who we are. We look at other people from a distance, and we somehow believe they do not suffer as we do, and if we simply wait long enough, we will enjoy the easy life they seem to be living. Of course, their lives aren't simple nor are they free from suffering - The reality of course is:

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation . . . . A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind."

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."
Henry David Thoreau

It could be those who seem to simply float through life are just better at the games and amusement.

If you seek only to avoid suffering, and to shelter yourslf from pain, then your life will be worthless. A life that is worth living is hard. Just as you cannot have a strong body without physical exerciseyou cannot have a strong spirit by living a life of ease. Dreaming is easy, but striving to achieve those dreams requires work, risk, passion - and an open heart. According to Thoreau, building castles in the air is what one should do, but after, you need to place the foundations under them....

I know many dreamers - it is the thing I think I love most about my current boyfriend. But I also watch him and I think he expects the foundations will build themselves. He speaks as if he will finish his thesis, and this will make him into a responsible person who wakes up in the morning. He talks of perhaps being 45 - and that he cant love me now, because there us a possibility that he will suddenly want a child of his own because he will be "grown up" enough.

It makes we want to shake him and yell - "You are 36. This is IT. Things won't change - only you can change. Be or don't be - but waiting is a waste of time....." We have the now... it is all God gives us! I would want to love him more, but his world is built in shifting sand, and I fear that if I love him too much things will fall on my head. Being in relationship with hm makes me a bit unstable, because his world seems to shift under my feet... while he changes not at all.

Then there is my friend - in our imaginary play world, she has dubbed herself "Agent Why / Why Not". She dreams, she's smart - but doubts seem to paralyze her. "Slow Down - its too fast! We don't know each other well enough! It might not work!"

And again, I want to shake her and yell - "Too fast? Our lives are half over! If not NOW, when?" and "Of course we don't know each other - none of us, not one of us - really truly ever knows another person. We build a life together over time, and as we build we grow, and we begin to understand" and "It may not work, its true - but we will never know unless we begin...."

I am like everyone else, in that I want to avoid suffering. I do not wish to be in pain. But to strive is to risk, to love another person opens your heart - and open hearts are innately vulnerable. Those I do not love cannot really hurt me, and risks I do not take have no chance of failing....

And there I am left - living a life of quiet desperation, relying on the amusements of mankind. Suffering all the same, yet never having achieved, loved, fought - nor ever having given myself a real reason to cry. And that, I think - is the real resignation, and where despair and hopelessness abide forever.

(ed. Special thanks to Henry David Thoreau - who helped me think today. )

PS

Just a thought.

Instead of being all evolved and forgiving and trying to meditate and have compassion for everyone....

Why can't I just be pissed off?

My mother was a horrible person, my stepfather was a pychopath, my brothers were turncoats, and my family - in general - behaved in a way that was more or less unforgivable.

So .... isnt there a good reason I can't just be angry at all those folks who should have taken care of me and didnt?

Just wanna know.....

Family, friends, and tribe

Christmas this year was wonderful. A miracle. It was affirmation of family and tribe - and a needed reminder of how blessed my life is.

It had been about 4 years since I had returned to San Francisco. The last time I left home, it was pretty terrible - a very sad and confused time. I was still halfway between my identity as Nick's wife and remembering my self. My identity wasn't firmly established, and the whole time home, I felt like a ghost.

After 4 years, however, I was as much myself as I was ever going to be, and we needed to see our family.

What did I learn? You can go home again, if the people there are really your home. And more, that these people I call my family now are extraordinary people - and they love me!!!! More than this, they really like me. They think I am extraordinary too.

As wrapped as I was in my illusions of identity, I never really understood the blanket of love and affection I was always wrapped within. I never believed that anyone could love me. I believed the stories others told me about myself. First my mothers stories, and then Nick's stories. Without knowing my own story, all I could do is fight to prove those stories wrong, but I never really believed it.

My journey of the last few years has been in remembering myself to me. It has been hard because I have so many confused and unclear memories, where I have memories at all - but finally, this year I was finally able to feel and see what others saw and felt about me. I finally know that I am, indeed, well loved.

Then, another Christmas miracle happened. I got a letter from someone I went to school with. Someone who loved me and had taken care of me - someone who had been my friend. The sad thing was that I had virtually no memory of this person, he had been wiped from my mind as I have wiped so many other memories.

He told me some stories of who I was as a young girl. The thing is, the stories he told me were so different than what I remembered - but so entirely consistent with who I have become that they could not be denied.

I believed I was a wild child with a bad reputation and no friends. The school slut. He told me that boys talk - and when the boys talked about me the conversation was that I didn't put out. More than this, he told me that I wasn't shunned, nor hated. I was popular.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I was so convinced of the story that said no one liked me, no one loved me, I was a bad girl and big slut with such big troubles, that the mere notion that I was liked by anyone was inconceivable to me.

Do you know how much of my life I have wasted assuming that I had to try to make people like me, that everyone I met was going to hate me? I made so many of my life decisions, based on a story that was NOT TRUE, NOT MINE - and had never ever belonged to me. I was always fine, I was always worthy of love, and I built a life around a notion that I was broken and unworthy.

Gary inspired me to reach out to the one person who I clearly remembered, and whom I dearly loved. He was there in the worst of it, and wasmy first friend, my first true love, and the first member of my tribe.

John had left me suddenly, abandoned me cold - and I never really knew why. He just stopped loving me. It was a loss that I never really grieved, until now.

I was hoping John would be glad to hear from me - that he has wondered about me over the years, and would be happy to know that I was safe and sound and far away. But - no, I don't think he was. As a matter of fact, he seemed suspicious and wary - the same as the last time I saw him. It made me sad.

Then he said something that literally took my breath away.

"in my defense I was only 17, and I didn't know what to believe... And your mother was very convincing"

I do not even need to guess what she said. I used to hear her drink and dial, listening to the things she told others about me. From the time I was 11, she would call people and tell them monstrous lies about me, that I was a slut, a whore, was sneaking out with boys at night and that I was a compulsive liar. And there was nothing I could do - my mother was so good at playing the victim, compelling people to take care of her. I was helpless to stop her.

She set me up to be a whore for her husband, and even before it happened, she made sure that no one would believe me. She blocked all my escape routes before the fact. It was premeditated.

Yet somehow, I MUST believe that she did this without her own knowledge, because I cannot believe that any mother could do this to a child with forethought. I prefer to believe she was insane, a sociopath with a multiple personality disorder.

She loved me. She hated me. She gave birth to me, then sought to destroy me. I will never really understand in a million years. It was just our karma.

But, the fact remains - if I understand John's meaning, she destroyed my first love, and in doing so destroyed the innocence of a young man who I loved with all my heart.... And it will take all the self discipline and prayer I can muster to forgive her for hurting him.

I wanted to pursue this friendship with John, get his help in filling in the blanks, so I can finally reassemble my memory and make sense of my own story. He was my first freind, and I will cherish him in my heart always.

But John doesn't remember me, he remembers the story my mother made of me. I can't blame him, because I believed her story for a very long time too... Even though I knew better. I would not want someone like that in my life either.....

Now I know what happened though. Now I know what changed, and why love died. I mourn the damage done to that sweet and gentle young man I once loved so very much - my friend and my kin.

So perhaps now that I have the body, I can, at last, bury it.