Morning came early today. 4:00 am on a Saturday seems earlier than necessary. I started the day with meditation, then yoga, quietly piecing together my self-care from the tattered remains of routines torn down by more spontaneous others. My traveling partner sleeps in his bedroom. His visiting son occupies another. I am awake, quietly, with my coffee, my laptop balanced in my lap, on a cushion.
The evening ended oddly. A wrong note in a beautiful symphony. A terse “you’re just wrong” interrupting an explanation, and an abrupt good-night hug and the evening was over. Human primates, still primates. In the moment, it felt dismissive and rude to be treated with disrespect, however inconsequential the detail. This morning I’m inclined to let it go; my traveling partner is as human as anyone. It was a moment, and the moment has passed. That it lingers in my recollection is more a matter of needing to take care to ensure that my hurt feelings don’t fester, and that I take time to acknowledge them, myself, and treat myself with respect and kindness. Emotional self-sufficiency for the win. 🙂
As with any choice, there are verbs involved.
The kindest people are capable of being unkind. The most peaceful people have the potential to be provoked into a moment of violence. The loftiest of goals is only a daydream, without actions. Our most heartfelt beliefs have no substance that we don’t give them ourselves; reality does not care what we believe. The people who profess their love for us are also most likely to hurt us, most often and most deeply. We are most easily hurt by those who matter most to us. I sip my coffee and consider these assumptions. They are part of who I am. I accept them, generally, as fact. Are they? Experience suggests they are, and I’ve learned hard lessons that tend to reinforce these ideas as true in my own life. Still… I don’t know that these are factual statements, only that they are statements that tend to express some experience I have had, myself, as clearly as I am able to express it.
Learning to comfortably accept that we are each having our own experience has also been a journey to understanding that our ability to empathize, to understand, to “relate” to each other builds on a peculiar thing; the tendency to assume shared qualities of mind, of thinking, of values, and of experience in those with whom we share life, which is in no way actually assured. We really are each having our own experience. There is no reason to assume you know what I know, that you have lived what I have lived. We are tempted into it by the vast quantity of shared and common experiences we do have… but there is so much more to each of who we are than what we tend to assume about each other, or perhaps even ourselves. There’s a limited amount of “we”, really, and it isn’t always quite where I think it is, myself. Oddly, we are also so much more similar than we tend to think of ourselves… it’s… complicated.
In context, the larger context of a lifetime, a moment of impatience or rudeness is minutiae, hardly worth a second thought. 🙂
It’s hard to unsay the words.
The sky is just beginning to lighten. Occasionally I hear stirring in another room. A cough. A shuffle. A bump. Living creatures, living. Outside, too, life; ducks on the marsh call back and forth, disturbed by passing runners, and songbirds are commencing their morning announcements. Life. I sip my coffee and wonder what the day holds.
This here, this now, this is enough.
Evening Light 