Trying to Live

I've realized that I've been trying to feel a certain way (detached) because I think I want to, or ought to, or something, rather than realizing what I am feeling (stuff!) and allowing that experience to be.

The summer seemed to be blissful and well, but now I suspect it was because I cared for nothing deeply. Perhaps detachment has its downside, the lack of wildness.

So, now, in choosing to care about a few things, while trying to let others go, I'm trying to find what it is to live - the blissful sort of contentment typically associated with enlightenment (making no claims for myself) has gotten old - steady can be reassuring or boring.

It's worth acknowledging that the I-don't-care attitude helped. It gave me the freedom to be myself, without fear for what anybody might think about me. Let me be more honest with others, but more importantly, with myself (read: vastly more accepting of myself now than then). And facing the chance of rejection (which I didn't care about, remember) head-on let me realize that rejection isn't so bad, and that rejection says more about the rejector than the rejectee.

A close friend is wandering a loosely parallel path - finding that being a little more compulsive or a little less, erm, complacent? feels more like living.

That said, I feel as though a chapter ended weeks ago, and only now I turn the page. Onward with the grand experiment, life.

Pain is easy.

Dealing with pain is easy. Now, leaving yourself open to it, letting yourself experience, be vulnerable to, the whole spectrum of human experience, and really living - now, that is difficult.

Lingering questions

What is love? At the end of October 2005, my first serious relationship ended, and while it was an amicable parting I also felt disillusioned. As with career choices, trying to find what I'm looking for in a relationship has been a source alternately of nonchalance (it'll pull itself together) and trepidation (but what if?). These are, after all, major life choices, at least the way things are conventionally looked at.

Not that I'm looking for any answers - easy or otherwise. I think it's the kind of question one has to live through to understand - after finding the courage to live it - and the key to the answer is in understanding the question. I think. At the same time, there are a few people to whom I would say "I love you" and know it to be truthful - though I do wonder what I mean by it.

In so many situations, I find myself simultaneously aware of the way things typically go, or what our culture typically expects - and how my experience has nothing to do with it. The observation doesn't bother me, I've never fit the expected but have been increasingly comfortable with that, but it is interesting. Does anyone else experience the same dichotomy?

For the moment - enough

This morning I arrive at the office feeling exceptionally cheerful. Perhaps it's the gorgeous weather - mid 60s, north breeze, clear and sunny - I'm fighting a strong urge to go get my bike and go for a 30mi ride - may I be excused for a couple hours? - or maybe how lovely it was to wake up this morning and lay in bed awhile before rising, or maybe that I got the best hot chocolate I have ever had and a scone from the city's best bakery - well, it was between the client's house and city hall! I feel like Scrooge, speculating what might be causing his midnight specters.

Causality doesn't matter, of course. Right at this moment (speaking for this moment and not necessarily for any other moment) I feel pretty stinking good. And I'm not feeling the urge to overanalyze, or, in the absense of immediate impetus for rumination, to pick up one of my usual favorite ways to trouble myself, like the question of the nature of existence.

For the moment, simply enjoying being is good enough.