Nutshell update. Since I seem to post about once every full-moon, I’ll try to cram it all into this session of typing.
Went to the beach last week. It poured all day. That was kinda OK because all I really wanted to do was wander around real beach-people, in the vague vicinity of real beach-memories. I didn’t really want to make anything new. How old of me.
I went with Irene, our first time together since last summer. We do work together, but encountering people at work is like dashing past a fellow combatant in the trenches. The subtleties of human emotion can be safely tossed aside, maybe to be picked-up and re-examined again at a later time. Maybe not.
On this trip I got to thoroughly expound on all my analyses of life –from when we, each of us, chose courageously before birth to dive into this experience of human life, then through all of the tumult and trauma that ensued, and right up until the present, which is a product of those events combined with our responses to them. And the purple-grey sky, and the steel-blue water, and the cold vacant beach all played backdrop to my presentation. Powerpoint could not have done it better.
There was the outrageously expensive seafood, served in one of Hampton Beach’s charmingly trashy establishements. We were cold and drenched, and it was the only place without its air-conditioning blasting. In fact, it had garage doors all around the dining/drinking/pool-playing area, all wide open to admit the crowds and the glories of summer –only there weren’t any that day.
All in all, it was a pleasant day. It was as if everything we encountered during our rainy beach day was clinging to a wishful optimism, though disappointed. That was so nice, for a little while, not to be the only one.
I did come home with a small revelation. I have always been stuck at a point where I am able to apprehend all the facts, and can see all of the consequences but cannot answer the question, “What are you going to do about it?” Irene’s experiences with life thus far have led her to formulate the same question in a slightly different way; what do you want?
I am no less stuck here, but this question presents to me the root of what restrains me. I can gnaw at my anchor’s chain, lose all my teeth and spend all my days so engaged, knowing there will be no danger of severing it and therefore never any need to confront any of the subsequent navigational risks of living life free.
What do you want?
Well, I want to keep misidentifying the problem so that I don’t have to actually decide what I want. I want to avoid weighing anchor, because this is not a burden forged by me. In fact, this particular burden was not foisted upon me by a mere stranger, seeking with nothing more than callous disregard to offload an unwanted encumbrance. Strangers are not supposed to love me, necessarily, and so I could address his calloussness as just that, tossing him and his baggage overboard unrepentantly.
But it was not a stranger who did this to me, it was the first person to love me in this life. The person who knew me first and best maliciously tied me down in this sewagey back water because she was too afraid to leave it herself, and too afraid to admit that she did not have to stay there. If she could make me stay stuck, she could then pretend that her misery was inevitable, that no other choice was possible. With me stuck by her side, she could pretend that vessels like herself were never meant to travel beyond the putrid swamp in sun and wind and sea, to the wide world beyond. With me stuck by her side she didn’t have to be alone.
I don’t know why she stayed stuck all her life, but I know why I stay stuck. If I come unstuck, I will have to rewrite my foundations and revise my concept of love itself, for the one who did this to me was truly my first love. She is the one who introduced me to the concept of love, who taught me caring generosity, who sang to me as I lay giggling in her lap.
It is easier, and somehow more fitting, to be safely preoccupied gnawing on the chain that restrains me than to take all of these facts, and feel them.
Besides, I don’t know east from west anymore. What ever would I do outside my rotten pool?