Saturday morning. I was up a little later than has tended to be my long-time wake up time. Have I successfully reset that by an entire hour? Promising.
I sit for a moment in the warmth of my Traveling Partner’s pickup, thinking about the many things I have changed over the years, with patient practice and persistence. Incremental change over time is slow, but effective. I’m not much like that woman I was at 40. I’ve come a long way on this path I have chosen. I think about my beloved, and this relationship that has seen (and nurtured) so much of my growth. I smile. I’m grateful and fortunate.
The rain was falling before I got to the trailhead. I sit waiting for the sun and a break in the rain. Oh, for sure I’ll set off down the trail and most likely the rain will start falling again. That’s the way of things, isn’t it? It’s not generally helpful to get stuck on some one plan or set of circumstances; change is.
What love looks like may vary.
A couple days before Valentine’s Day, my Traveling Partner had given me a packet of adorable stickers – so many! They delight me. Yesterday, hanging out and watching a favorite show at the end of the evening, he went to the door (unexpectedly, from my perspective) and returned with a playful demeanor, opening a package. More stickers!! I smile every time I think about them this morning. We shared going through them one by one, delighting in the ones most meaningful or cutest to one or the other of us. Sooo many stickers. I feel very loved and visible. Understood. What a rare and beautiful feeling.
Even after I’d called it a night, I couldn’t stop looking at them, astonished by my Traveling Partner’s love for me.
Can love be measured in stickers?
The rain continues to fall. I sit listening to it, feeling loved, and merry. The unit of measure is unimportant, it could be heartbeats, kisses, stickers, or even raindrops. I am grateful to be so well loved. I think of my beloved sleeping at home. I hope he gets the rest he needs and wakes feeling wrapped in all the love I feel for him. It’s a lot. We’re fortunate to have each other. (We also work at love, together, because it matters. What could be more worthy of that effort?)
I think I may paint today, or perhaps relax with my book, reading by the fireplace… It’s almost time to begin again.
I reached the trailhead at daybreak. The days are getting longer, and dawn comes a little earlier. I also slept a little later, and got a later start. It all makes sense.
The tangle of oak branches against the gray winter sky manages to look a little eery, and the marsh trail is quiet. I have it to myself this morning. It is a Wednesday. I took off from work for a appointment later; I would have had trouble focusing on anything else. It’s to do with a fraud someone attempted to perpetrate against us back in the fall. It was massively stressful, and without my Traveling Partner’s calm support, I’d have probably lost my mind. It helped that there were clear steps to take to protect myself, my property, and safeguard my family, but it was also costly and vexing. I’m glad it is over.
… Human beings can be such bastards…
Taking time for this moment, now.
I get to my halfway point, and stop awhile to write and reflect. (This is me, now, doing that.) It’s a cold morning. Properly cold, at 31F (0.5C). After my walk, coffee with a friend (who is also a colleague), and on into the city for my appointment. It feels like a busy day, but it’s more that the events on my calendar are significant or important in some way, than truly being busy. I think about that awhile; how subjective our sense of time really is.
An enormous flock of geese takes to the sky from the marsh. It fills the sky overhead as it passes. There is a thin layer of ice over the marsh ponds. The meadow grass sparkles with frost. However long or short the moments feel, in a practical sense there’s really only “now” to work with.
I think about my Traveling Partner, hoping he is getting the rest he needs and that I managed to slip away without disturbing him. We’ve had a couple of difficult days together, which sucks, particularly considering how much we’re both obviously putting into having a better experience than we are. Shit gets real sometimes. We’re both going through some health stuff that complicates our shared experience. We’ll get past these challenges. We’ve gotten through worse.
I yawn and stretch. My fingers are getting cold. I look down the trail – “steps on a path”, I think to myself. Time to begin again.
Once upon a time, many years ago, a younger version of me was making the trip down to visit family in Baltimore over a weekend. At the time, I was stationed at Aberdeen Proving Ground (more specifically, at Edgewater Arsenal). It was winter, and the roads were icy and there was a heavy snow falling. A smarter human primate would have more carefully considered the risks and stayed “home”, safe and warm in the barracks. I chose differently.
As the rear end of my Honda CRX Si broke loose from the icy road, and the car began to slide sideways around the tight curve of the offramp, spinning slowly, I resisted the urge to apply the breaks, began down shifting gently, and steering against the spin. I began rethinking my life choices. I came to a stop at the foot of the offramp, grateful there was no one behind me, and that I hadn’t hit anything. The car stopped, centered in my lane, but facing the wrong direction. I counted myself lucky, and got turned around, then finished my drive to my Aunt’s house.
… It’s a metaphor…
The unexpected is going to happen. However well-prepared we may think we are for this or that circumstance, we are mortal creatures of limited vision, and our meager preparations are no match for the vagaries of reality. Sometimes shit is just going to go sideways, whether we are prepared or not, and all we can do is hold on and do our best to “steer out of it”, and maybe learn something.
Yesterday was pleasant. The additional rest of sleeping in made a lot of difference and I enjoyed the day in my Traveling Partner’s good company. We are each having our own experience, and today is a new and entirely different day. Had I known when I woke this morning what I know now about where we each stand with our own shit to deal with, I might have made very different plans. 😆 Here I am, thoroughly human, crying in my partner’s pickup, parked at a local trailhead, thinking perhaps I’ll “just walk it off”, but it’s hard to walk while crying. My tears make my eyes burn, and the trail is crowded with strangers today. I don’t want to deal with them any more than I want to deal with me.
My head aches and my tinnitus is loud enough to be a distraction and uncomfortable. I’m irritable, partly just because those things are irritating, but also because my beloved is similarly irritable himself, for his own reasons, and we can’t manage to coexist in shared space, for the moment. Easier to just leave the house and know that one of us may find something like peace, maybe. Maybe not. I just don’t know what else to do at this point, besides give him space and take some for myself.
Like winter, circumstances are not personal.
The sky is gray. The trees are bare. The mild temperature doesn’t hide the fact that it is a bleak wintry day. I’m probably bringing the gray bleakness with me. I’d like to be at home, reading and resting or playing a video game, or baking or just anything besides sitting here crying in a parking lot. Acknowledging these feelings only serves to remind me I could have grabbed the book I’m reading and brought it with me. Stupid drama-prone primate brain! Inefficient. I sigh to myself. I try to meditate. I breathe, exhale, and… It’s hard to relax with my tinnitus shrieking in my ears this way.
A lot of the shit we go through is hard, but very little of it is “personal”. I remind myself to let small shit stay small, and to assume positive intent. I remind myself to do my best, and to take care of myself. I remind myself to be kind, patient, and compassionate – to my Traveling Partner and to myself. I remind myself to ask for help when I need it, and to accept it graciously when offered.
I reach out to the Anxious Adventurer, and ask if he can handle doing the dishes and making dinner? I’m grateful that he can. My feet already ache from my walk earlier, but I grab my cane and my resolve and get ready to put another mile on my boots. I want something better out of the day, and I will have to begin again to get there.
The details don’t much matter, and the decision to have the Anxious Adventurer move out was already made (planned for April, after winter weather is not a serious risk). I had hoped we’d all coexist relatively peacefully in the meantime. Yesterday evening was revealing, and unfortunately nonnegotiable boundaries were violated (and had been for some time, although I was not explicitly aware of it, yet). I’m disappointed, and honestly still rather angry. The plan is still locked in, that hasn’t changed. How I feel about this third human being under my roof has changed – a lot. I sigh to myself, annoyed to be sitting here dealing with that bullshit at all.
Well shit. I really wanted to make things work comfortably well with the Anxious Adventurer coming to move in with us. There are a lot of potential advantages to shared living, and our society places value on family.
I am disappointed that this won’t work long-term, and my Traveling Partner admitted that the downsides and inconveniences outweigh the value for him, too. I know the additional emotional labor, for me, has outpaced the day-to-day advantages to having an additional family member in the household. This shit is hard. I keep asking myself if I’ve done my best, and wondering if I have failed to be… something. If we were each different people dealing with different issues, this totally could work. I keep thinking about that, too. Am I depriving my beloved Traveling Partner of the opportunity to be close to his son? I think I’ve been persistently encouraging and supportive, coaching where I could…
I’ve struggled with having less privacy, with being required to do too much emotional labor, with the lack of personal space, and the frustration of trying to cohabitate with someone who showed up wholly ignorant of some commonplace life skills, and basic manners, but I am not looking forward to the practical requirements of the changes ahead; more g’damned work. I’m simultaneously very much not sorry this will soon be over, and also deeply regretful and disappointed that it didn’t work out.
…If you invite a feral animal into your home, you mustn’t be surprised when it shits on the carpet, but you also don’t have to let it stay if it won’t learn new ways…
I breathe, exhale, and relax. Human beings being human. Communication is complicated. Moving into a strange household in a faraway place where the manners and expectations are new is challenging. I knew going into this that it would present some variety of difficulties, but figured we’d work them out together, as families do. Like an orchestra with musicians looking at different sheet music than the players alongside them, there was little harmony and a lot of wrong notes. I’m fucking over it. I’m annoyed with myself for being as angry as I am. It’s not reasonable to blame a feral animal for not being well brought up. I just also don’t want to deal with the associated bullshit.
We each make choices. The Anxious Adventurer made his. He chose poorly, in my opinion, and in spite of steady support, encouragement, coaching and guidance. I sigh in frustration and disappointment. I don’t wish him ill, but I do wish I weren’t dealing with these circumstances at all. I remind myself how close April really is. I lived in a tent for almost a year with 15 guys, most of whom i barely knew, a couple of whom I actively disliked, and it was…fine. I can endure 60 days more of this crap, too. It will pass.
Once he’s gone, I have no doubt there will be things I miss. He’s my Traveling Partner’s son, and I hope he visits in the future – I just don’t want to live with him, at least not right now, and I don’t think I can persuade myself to trust him again. If nothing else, he needs to take some time and work on the man he wishes to become, and I really can’t help him with that (and he does not know how to accept help yet). Sitting here this morning, listening to the rain falling, and waiting for the sun, I don’t even want to try to help him further than I have. It’s not a useful way to spend my time.
A new day dawns, full of promise and opportunities, but we’ve each got to make our own choices, and do our own work.
I breathe, exhale, and relax. I feel settled with myself and my decision making. I feel comfortable in my skin, and accepting of the person I have grown to be over time. The journey is the destination. There is further to go on this path. We each walk our own mile, each having our own experience. I do hope the Anxious Adventurer finds his way.
I turn my attention to this moment here, now. The rain falls steadily. I watch the predawn twilight become the dawn of a new day, and in spite of the dreary gray of this rainy morning, I’m filled with eagerness. I am having brunch with the Chaotic Comic this morning. She shares some of the communication challenges of the Anxious Adventurer (as do many others in their general age group). There is a key difference that limits my irritation with those challenges in our friendship; I’m not having to live with them. My friend is also more receptive to discussion, and more open to considering suggestions for potentially useful changes and able to speak up to explicitly reject suggestions she does not favor. It feels like a conversation – because it is. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised; she’s a comedian and “yes, and…” is an important part of improvisation, a learned skill.
We become what we practice.
… Still… I do wish I could have made things work, for my Traveling Partner and his son. I’d have liked to provide a firm foundation for them to deepen and build on their relationship, and I’m disappointed to have failed. I sit listening to the rain and considering what I could have done differently, myself, but it mostly isn’t about that. I can’t do that work for someone else, only for me. I’m walking my own path.
I sigh to myself and make room for gratitude. I have much to be grateful for, even within the context of this disappointing and aggravating shared living experience. I’ve learned some things about myself. Having some help was… helpful. I truly needed it, so many times. I breathe, exhale, and let my anger go. It has served its purpose and only gets in the way, now. Brunch soon, and a chance to begin again.
It’s nice to find a moment of beauty in trying times. I took a picture of a lovely sunrise moment the other day. Yesterday? The day before? It does nothing to capture the context, an empty fallow field, not suited to sports or play, uneven and treacherous to walk, with a well-used “fitness trail” wrapping around it like a muddy ribbon. In full daylight, it’s not an especially beautiful or enticing location. This picture though? A beautiful sunrise, captured to inspire me far longer than standing there in person in some other moment could.
Is it a beautiful sunrise, or an unkempt empty lot?
Reality is what it is, but what we each understand reality to be is very much a completely other thing, mostly made up in our heads. We’re each having our own experience. We understand the world filtered through the lens of our own experience and whatever useful perspective we may have adopted (or been trained upon) over a lifetime. Human primates appear to be creatures capable of reason, and great depth of understanding…but we’re also shortsighted, emotional, and prone to self-delusion. We use words carelessly (and sometimes aggressively) and we walk away from a great many interactions with a very different understanding of what was said than others involved.
I had a powerful reminder of how easily human communication goes quite wrong in spite of good intentions. I recently asked the Anxious Adventurer to share his “move out plan” with us, hoping to have a better idea of his hoped for timing, target dates for various commonplace milestones in any move, and knowledge of his general plan and how far along he is with all of it. This felt very routine to me; we’re looking at an April move, most likely, and that puts things in the upcoming 90 days.
… Communication is complicated…
The Anxious Adventurer misunderstood me to mean “get the fuck out as soon as possible and tell me how you are going to do that”, although I don’t think my words or tone suggested that. I can only imagine the stress that caused him! I didn’t notice how my request hit him. My Traveling Partner spotted something amiss, but it wasn’t clear what. The Anxious Adventurer, a “millennial” by generation, kept his feelings to himself, and struggled alone without asking any clarifying questions. Obviously less than ideal all around. Hopefully an educational experience for each of us.
Once the miscommunication was revealed, we sorted it out and talked over the basic plan. I guess the short lesson is use your words with care and clarity, ask questions, and make a point of defining terms and assessing the quality of a shared understanding. Like that picture of a lovely sunrise looking out across an unkempt empty field strewn with obstacles and litter, what we think we understand may not be all there is to know – or even accurate to circumstances. Fact checking, testing assumptions, and asking clarifying questions are basic communication. As I said, communication – good communication – can be complicated. Certainly it requires practice.
…It does tend to begin with speaking the fuck up when clarity and shared understanding are lost…
(Sometimes we just don’t know we didn’t understand, or failed to communicate clearly.)
I sigh to myself, sitting at my halfway point on a local trail shortly before daybreak. I enjoy writing in the stillness and quiet before the day begins. A new day feels filled with promise and hope. I savor this quiet moment before a new work day gets going. I sit with my thoughts awhile. The work day will come soon enough. This moment here, now, is mine.
I breathe, exhale, and relax, watching the waning moon slowly setting. I’ll begin again a little later.
Evening Light 