How can I ever keep this short and sweet?
All my life I’ve been on the outside. As an Air Force brat, I was always the new kid in class. I never knew friends longer than six months or a year, and then we moved again — over 40 actual changes of residence before I graduated from high school. That was hard enough, although I had the compensation of gaining an enormous amount of experience going to school in different states and countries. What never became clear until I was well into middle age was how dysfunctional my family life had been, and into what a danger to myself and others this had molded me.
True enlightenment is excruciatingly gradual in nature, because it doesn’t “take.” That is to say, one experiences shocking moments of clarity and emotional release, but the underlying patterns — the unconscious structures created in the course of one’s upbringing — are so far removed from everyday awareness that one still crashes into the wall, even with eyes wide open. It’s kind of like the dirt road to our home back in Taos: over the horribly muddy late winter, the ruts became so deep that when things finally dried out, the ruts were (and are) still there…
In my case at least, the truth gets revisited time and time again, but the interval between experiencing negative emotion and re-centering grows shorter. The ruts are still there, but tend to have less impact when I drive over them. I’m able to spend more and more time in a state of relative peace and calm engagement, but it takes constant vigilance! Repeated perceived assaults on my ego, motives, or intentions will eventually succeed [see previous post], and I react accordingly, manning the ramparts to repel an “enemy” who really only lurks within.
This is absolutely the hardest lesson to learn, and from the looks of the world, most of us never do. It’s far, far easier to project — which simply means that we see our pain reflected in the faces of others and cast blame. Usually the supposedly guilty party invites such judgment, tying everything up in a neat little package that’s almost impossible to unwrap. (We do the same thing when we fall in love, only this involves projection of our better nature…)
This brings me to something that came up while looking over my last post:
Yes, the collective IS insane. Most of us lead unquestioned lives, persisting in patterns of unsustainable behavior that only become obvious through disaster — and that’s if we’re lucky. But in a sense, pain and demons are a gift. They can lead you to the good stuff. I have a hard time sometimes when I’m “in the world,” because i see it as a threat to my integrity, something like: I don’t want to live this way, yet all these others DO, so either there’s something wrong with me, or I’m okay but everyone wants to kill me. Paranoia? Sure, but natural as anything. It sometimes leads to pre-emptive attacks. After all, if I can change the way other people think, the threat will disappear — except that the collective can’t be bludgeoned into submission. Hell, that’s what makes it a collective. It’s largely unconscious. It doesn’t even know it exists!
So.
The only way forward is to BE the change one wants. If I want to be loved, I have to love myself, and that’s the part that got left off at the factory. With regard to how others live, well, I don’t have to DO that, do I?
(And neither do you.)
Comment by Gregory LeFever
1 May 7, 2008, 10:25 am o'clock |
That’s a deep and candid post, John, and I thank you for trusting the world enough to put it forth. I’m not trying to be clever or cute, but there’s one sentence I question: “If I want to be loved, I have to love myself, and that’s the part that got left off at the factory.”
If that were entirely true, John, you would have put a bullet through your head a long time ago. Literally. A man cannot have the presence of mind, the humor, and the love of this world that you exhibit in your writings day after day after day and not have the capacity to love himself and therefore the people around him.
Comment by John H. Farr
2 May 7, 2008, 12:47 pm o'clock |
I DO have the capacity to love myself — and I wonder how many people truly understand what that means or feels like? — but the point is that for decades, I didn’t, because the people who raised me didn’t feel good about themselves.
I was raised to be afraid: don’t aim too high (for you might crash & burn), don’t follow your heart (because that’s only for fools), and stick to something safe… The negative drumbeat continues to this day, but I’m thankfully mostly immune to it now, because I know it isn’t true!
I think I terrified my parents, who never knew quite what to do with me. They were always afraid that I was too creative (read: not manly enough), too smart (!), too outspoken, too “different,” etc. etc. and tried to stamp those things out for what they thought was my own good. For example, when I was 10 or 11 years old, I won a prize for a painting I produced during a summer progam, but that meant little to them. No one ever bought me art supplies or gave me the least bit of encouragement in that direction. I doubt they even knew how.
It got much worse than that. I could tell you stories that would break your heart. Heck, I could tell a story from last MONTH that would make people run for cover. The difference now is that I’m finally in charge, and it’s about damn time.
Comment by K.J. Webb
3 May 7, 2008, 2:06 pm o'clock |
It’s pretty well-established that creative people live a little nearer the edge than most of us. I suppose the point is to use that edginess without toppling over into the void. Most ordinary non-creative people also feel sort of uncomfortable and like strangers in the world from time to time. This probably started happening at about the time people were no longer tied from birth to death to a single little scrap of ground, with no options as to their occupations and living circumstances or what they believed or who they associated with. Sometimes we romanticize all this as the true and authentic life of natural man, or we call it the medieval synthesis, or we moan about modern man’s alienation from the soil or something of that sort. That sort of thinking goes back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But, for most everybody in the western world, that dog don’t hunt anymore. You, Johannes, suffered more dislocations than most of us in that era of the 50’s, and it took its toll on you. But being tied down (my own problem from that era) takes its own toll. The human critter is never happy whether tied or footloose. Never happy but never entirely without the hope of happiness. It’s so boring, in any event, to be straight-out contented. A spark of irritability and unsatisfied longing gets us out of the house and if it don’t kill us, makes us, if not stronger, at least more alert and more interesting to ourselves and, we hope, others. You know, it’s presumptuous of me to say this, but I bet those inlaws of yours kind of envy your free-spirited life and views. What was it Jack Nicolson said to Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in “Easy Rider”? “They hate you because you stand for freedom”. I would substitute “envy” for “hate”, and also say that the envy is likely diluted a tad with horror. Anyhow, as I’ve gotten older I see that there’s no royal road for us all. We gotta make up the life we want and move our carcasses on down the line. Better not to begrudge the choices others make, just make our own and stick to them.
Comment by donna
4 May 9, 2008, 6:14 pm o'clock |
Well of course Taos is still growing. You are still growing, in Taos. ;^)
So next time just smile and say yes, yes, it is…
I think learning to really love yourself, just as you are, is about the hardest thing of all. After that, you really do get that what others think is just their own problem. And you become ever so much more grateful for those that also love you just as you are.
Namaste….