Saturday, April 26, 2008

Psychic Farts

Remember my co-conspirator? The man in my life with whom I have started to breathe in tandem?

We have hit the danger zone. The point in all new relationships -- usually occurring about the 2 - 3 months mark, in my experience -- where suddenly the transparency starts to wear off.

You know what I'm talking about. It's that feeling you get when you first fall in love and every thought just flows completely seamlessly between the two of you. "I and my beloved are one." It's such a lovely feeling. You both marvel at the juiciness of the strawberries. You see the same shooting stars. You know, without a doubt, what the other is thinking at every moment of the day. And the blissfully transcendent part of that is... is that you're right. You DO know what the other is thinking. Your souls ARE commingled. It's heady, druggy, surreal and marvelously real stuff.

And then there's that moment. It's that moment when you look at the other person and you have no clue... NO clue... who he is, what he's he's thinking, what he's doing, or how he even got there in the first place. It's like a bad science fiction shot where suddenly the protagonist is wearing some hideously disfiguring mask and the heroine looks at him and scrapes at her face in screaming horror. Oh NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! It cannot BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

The transparency has been replaced by profound confusion and obscurity. Nothing makes sense anymore. You start to order iced tea for him -- because that's what he ALWAYS drinks and that's what you've ALWAYS done -- and he looks at you with disdain and orders lemonade. Or you order lemonade -- because he ALWAYS like to change things up and last time he ordered iced tea -- and he looks at you with disdain and orders iced tea. The rules are upside down, insane. And you feel like you've been slipped crazy pills and stuck in the wrong story with the wrong man. And you have a horrible feeling that it's going to have the wrong ending as well.

We found that spot last week. It was at Islands with the kids. I came out of the rest room and saw him looking out the window idly. And I could plainly see a huge thought bubble coming out of his head. A thought bubble that said "Is that all there is?" I fast forwarded, on his behalf, through the next forty years of our mutual lives together and could hear him screaming inside. It was going to be decades of this Islands, these teenagers, this tired old woman, this endless grinding choice between iced tea and lemonade.

The Precipitating Incident happened within the next hour. He said something that hurt my feelings. I mentioned it later. He got mad. Suddenly we're in uncharted territory: Our First Fight.

I'll spare you the details. It included the usual pieces on my part: lots of words, not enough words, and a migraine. I don't know his usual pieces, yet, but both of us processed a lot. And to our credit we delved in, did the analysis and soul searching and apparently have come out the other side intact.

And this is what I wrote him this morning: It kind of doesn't matter where that "is that all there is" aroma came from the other night. He could've been feeling trapped first, or I could have. When two people are dancing so closely together, it's hard to tell who originates and who projects. Whatever it is, and whoever the psychic fart emanates from, it becomes collectively apparent fairly immediately. On some level it really doesn't matter who starts up the music... because we're both going to start swaying in time to it in relatively short order.

It's a rite of passage, this ability to be more fully human. Thankfully (I say this with all sincerity) we're working on the psychic and not physical level yet, in terms of holding and releasing our inner gases... but it's a big step. There's stuff inside that needs to come out at times.

I have no good solutions as to how to best navigate this dark ugly stuff. But I do know it has to come out at some point, otherwise everyone's uncomfortable and it gets out anyway. To totally belabor this ridiculously gross metaphor (and then I'll stop, I promise), I think the key here is honesty and breathing room. And compassion for everyone's humanity. We all have our secret thoughts. We all have our moments of wanting an escape, even from things that we love. We (sorry, really, this is the last one) all gorge on the pleasures of life and sometimes we eat too fast. Sometimes we don't give ourselves time to digest. And sometimes we just are victims of our own unconscious reflexes.

Breathing room and honesty. And a sense of humor, that helps too. If I figure out where to find some psychic Bean-o, I'll let you know. I promise.

# posted by Katherine Shirek Doughtie @ 8:30 AM 3 comments

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Permissions

This morning I woke up thinking about the word "permission." It's a really interesting word when you open up the hood.

The "per" part is way cool -- it means "through," "thoroughly," "utterly," "very" -- as in "pervert," "pervade," and "perfect." (All my references, by the way, I got by clicking around Dictionary.com if you want to go play on your own.)

The "Mittere" part is a bit more complex. When used with Permission, it's defined as "to let, or to make (someone) go." When used with "Admit" however, they define it as "let go, to send" as in a mission. And when used with "Commit" it's defined as "to send, give over". The key thing I get from that is an active sending out and releasing.

So, in one way of looking at it, permission is an extremely active, maximum amount of sending out, releasing, and letting go. An active non-grasping. A conscious opening of the hands for the express purpose of releasing whatever is being held.

In software development, "permissions" are something a bit different. When a user is give a set of security rights, those are called his permissions. So you can have permission to edit one set of documents, but be in "view only" mode for financial spreadsheets. This kind of goes with this other sense of the word, which is "Consent, especially formal consent; authorization."

So it isn't just this opening up and sending out. Sometimes it's very very formalized. The "permit" is a legal document that authorizes availability to something. A permission is a physical (or digital) locking or unlocking that enables access to functionality.

Which makes me think we could do some interesting things with this word. Like, write down, physically, our permissions. What we are going to permit ourselves to do in this lifetime. Give ourselves a permit to make money, say, from our chosen dharmic path. (I so hope that's a word). Give ourselves a permit to be recognized publicly for our teachings and our creative skills. Give ourselves a permit to stop once in awhile (that's for me). Give ourselves a permit to breathe (that's also for me). Give ourselves a permit to be really, truly happy in relationship. Give ourselves a permit to love and be loved. On and on and on. Like a physical, written unlocking of some things.

Because it's not all about our grasping of stuff. Sometimes stuff has us in its grasp (inside our heads). Being locked in or out of something is a form of grasping. Having this deep feeling of not being deserving of something, is a locking in, like being inside of a clenched fist. Having a deep feeling of always being secondary, or invisible, or not enough... that's a grasping. It's a different form than we're used to thinking about. We usually talk about grasping in terms of aversion or attraction. This is when we are grasped, surrounded, kept from, not permitted... by our own thoughts. So the opening up and letting go is a permission. An active releasing. A conscious opening up of the grasping that surrounds us.

Little kids are taught to ask us adults for "permission" to do something. This is ingrained in us, this sense that we need to ask a higher authority for the ability to exercise a certain amount of freedom. When we're small, this makes a certain amount of sense; permissions are installed to keep us safe from dangers we don't yet understand. In software, this is known as a user's "security" setting -- if you are too inexperienced or too dumb to really be able to use all the functionality safely, you are constrained by the software itself to limit your freedom and access to certain pieces of the program.

But we're no longer kids, right? At least not in many areas. Maybe we need to look at the places that no longer need to be kept safely kept out of reach. Like excess money. Like excess creativity. Like excess love. Within moral bounds (like we can't give ourselves permission to go kill our boss when he pisses us off), we need to trust ourselves enough to use the entire program. Our security settings may need to be adjusted to accommodate the fact that we're no longer new to this life, we're no longer inexperienced, and maybe it's time for us to spread our wings and use all the tools available.

[Cross posted with my other blog at www.TheDHX.com. And special thanks to "L," my muse and playmate and partner in extraordinary conversation these days. You didn't exactly give me permission to repurpose my email to you this morning, but I'm doing it anyway.]

# posted by Katherine Shirek Doughtie @ 8:38 AM 0 comments

Monday, March 24, 2008

Saturday Night

"I want you to help me fulfill one of my deepest fantasies," I murmured into his ear the other night.

He glanced up at me, startled.

"Okayyyy," he said, with a nervous smile.

I took a deep breath and uttered words I never thought I'd be able to say to anyone in this lifetime. He listened thoughtfully, mulled it over a second, then put on his game face.

"OK," he said with a twinkle in his eye. "I'll drive."

Fifteen minutes later we were roaming the produce section of the new Whole Foods. The store is an orgiastic explosion of beautiful food and happy healthy people and I've been going there as a sort of religious ritual ever since it opened. And every time I've walked its still-gleaming aisles, I've experienced the same aching yearning. And that was to do exactly what we were doing now.

To go to Whole Foods, with a lover, to shop for food for a meal we would prepare together that evening seemed, for so long, like some unattainable Emerald City of joy. I don't know why it took on that proportion, but it always kind of shimmered with elusive sadness to me, like one of the most simple and intimate activities two people could do together. It implies comfort, and leisure, and dedication to spending time together. It implies that you've seen all the movies and gone to all the plays, and that you're so caught up with all your bookkeeping that the only thing left is to indulge in a four or five hour dinner. It's European. It's something you would see in a Meg Foster romantic comedy.

Obviously unattainable.

And here I was, with a willing participant in my little dream world. We wandered through the orderly stacks of vegetables, feeling and analyzing our choices like we were picking out items for a museum. We stood in front of the seafood counter and I looked at the eyeballs of the iced fish and the green sheen of the mussel shells and took a deep breath of contentment. Deeming the fish selection somewhat limited, we went upstairs and engaged the butcher in a deep discussion about the attributes of the perfect spencer ribeye steak. My companion selected a worthy cut; the butcher massaged the soft tissue of the meat with thumbs, declaring it a good choice; and I dropped the cool package into the cart with a sense of a job well done.

We prepared the vegetables first. He washed and chopped while I got the barbecue going. I added some balsamic marinade to the mix and dug out a big spoon for him to toss it with. The division of duties soon blurred. The meal evolved nearly without our participation; we just followed some instinctive choreography and moved through our steps without really thinking.

Afterwards, we settled ourselves in front of the TV to see what old movies might be on. "An American in Paris" was just starting and as we curled up to watch Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron fall in love on the banks of the Seine, I realized that we had just engaged in a similar dance. The effort was in the past, and all that was left was flawless execution.

# posted by Katherine Shirek Doughtie @ 7:18 AM 0 comments

Monday, March 10, 2008

Conspiracy

con·spire /kənˈspaɪər/ [kuhn-spahyuhr]
[Origin: 1325–75; ME < L conspīrāre to act in harmony, conspire, equiv. to con- con- + spīrāre to breathe; see spirant, spirit]

I find myself in a conspiracy. With a man. We are breathing together. Acting in harmony. Our spirits are commingling.

We hesitate to put a capital "R" in front of the word that describes what we may be embarking on. Like naming God, we know the danger of putting labels on things. Labels call to them their own destruction. We talk around it, acknowledging the essential messiness of all such liasons, their potential for pain. We have both been around the block so many times that a night with YouTube and a beer seems a very viable substitute for all human entanglement.
And yet.

It is good. It is scary. The feelings contain spectrums of color I swear I've never seen before. It is poignant. And much of the time it is oddly calm, like when you're driving 100 miles an hour behind a fully loaded semi, and feel yourself weightless and gliding, pulled by the slipstream.

Today he is sick. Not in a way that will keep him down more than a few days, but sick enough to be reclusive and inward. This little deviation is enough to call forth my own inner demons. Today my fear takes me hostage. I am consumed with it, unable to believe that the whispers of loss could possibly be false.

The fear is a hangover. The last time I saw him was as pure and simple as my imagination today is complex and dark. Maybe it's my own fatigue creeping in. He apologizes profusely for exposing me to his germs, is scared I'll blame him if I get sick. I try to explain to him that it would be fine. That getting sick would be a sign of connection that I haven't felt in so many years. My immunity is strong. But if I fall ill, it was worth it many times over.

I think about this today as I am encased in an office conference room, locked in an endless meeting. The conversation we had on my way into work swirls in my head, making me crazy with my inability to escape and participate in my real life. Words forms inside my brain, take shape with urgency, and I start scribbling madly in the margins of my handout.

This is what I write:

We are infected with love. We are infected with loss. We cannot help but spread our joy, our fear and our sorrow. It is a symptom, a condition of being human.

We don't do this to each other. It is a function of our being, of our breathing in and out. We spread our emotional germs as a by-product of our interchange, our interdependence.

We breathe the same air. I inhale what you give off. You inhale my detritus. I can stay safe only by never breathing in. You can keep from infecting others only by not ever letting go. Keeping everything to ourselves is impossible. I need what you've got, and you need me.

We are mechanisms that live by ingesting the refuse of each other. Our lungs rise and fall in tandem, like the waves upon the sand. We have no control over what we carry with us. We give off energy like radiant spores. Our energy infects and heals and soothes and agitates. We can attribute blame or feel guilt but the things we emit are outside of our control. Our cross-contaminations are what keep us alive.

Sometimes the air we breathe is suffused with joy. The smell of clean laundry, night blooming jasmine, a lover's skin. It is impossible to distinguish the perfume from the poison. To be afraid of inhaling one is to lose the other forever. The equation simply does not square itself out.

No matter what we call this thing, I am pleased to be infected with it. I am happy to have it in my blood stream. Without a doubt, it could turn on me and knock me on my ass so fast my eyeballs would explode. I understand that part. I don't like breathing air mixed with equal parts danger and sanctuary. But that's the nature of this conspiracy. It's never one or the other. It's a cycle of give and take. And the alternative to both is to sit in fear on the sidelines, waiting for the safe moment, for the clean touch.

# posted by Katherine Shirek Doughtie @ 10:07 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Why We Do It

Sioux City, Iowa. Temperature outside: 11 degrees.

I am out on the road with Opera A La Carte. For the 24th year, I am in a overly heated hotel room looking outside at a blanket of snow-covered flatness. We did a show yesterday in Wayne, Nebraska where the temperature at load-out was 3 degrees ("feels like -14" say weather.com). Yesterday the high was 11 and today it looks like we'll get to 20, so we're in for some balmy weather.

Today we drive to Lincoln, Nebraska. Part of this is fun, if you consider the simple pleasures of free raisin bran and whole milk in the morning a fun thing. (I do.) Sometimes putting in a show is fun, albeit hard work (the day goes from 9 a.m until midnight, so it's a long day.) And sometimes, like yesterday, it's not that fun.

Yesterday was one the two days in the last 24 years that I had serious and profound doubts that we would be able to have a show. There are always problems to be solved, but I have never really been in a position to really doubt whether we could do the thing at all. Good, bad or indifferent, the curtain always rises and some kind of lighting comes up and singing occurs and music happens and we do a show. We've had fires, accidents, heart attacks (in the audience), injuries (onstage), more "wardrobe malfunctions" than anyone can count, lost props, dropped lighting cues, dropped lighting instruments (that was fun), ripped curtains, failed scenery, 35 minute intermissions because of impossible set changes -- you name it, we've done it. Every show is different. Every show has its own brand of catastrophe. And every show goes the same way: it starts, it continues, and it ends with applause.

Yesterday was a new one for me. At five minutes before the house opened I had no lighting cues whatsoever. After a day of focusing, troubleshooting dimmers, hanging and patching and cutting non-essentials and (then) cutting essentials, we had finally gotten to a place of looking at cues. And realized, the very hard way, that my lighting guy didn't know how to run the board. Like... AT ALL. Couldn't save a cue, couldn't separate the house lights from the stage lights, couldn't combine more than several lighting channels (they had to be contiguous) more than one chunk at a time.

So my options were to bring up an official cue (with a bunch of different lights) WITH the houselights up all at once, or turn everything off and then build the cue in real time while the singers were singing. Which is what we ended up doing. While the house was filling up, we managed to figure out how to a) turn off the house lights (that was a big step), b) turn on the conductor's light, c) turn on one chunk of stage lighting at a time. Because we could do those three things, at will, on cue, in various orders, we had a show. A show that looked absolutely and incontrovertably BAD... bad bad bad... but a show. And, of course, the audience had no clue and gave us a standing ovation.

Why do we do this? This is a question that my boss (the director/producer and star) and I ask each other all the time. Over the years we've had a variety of answers: "Because we love the money" (yeah right!!!) or "because we're stupid" (my personal favorite for about five years). But the best one we've come up with, that has stuck for a long time is "because we don't know how to stop." This is actually the most true: we don't know how to stop. I don't know how to stop being in this company, with people I've known for half my life, working for a man who is as infuriating and endearing as my father. It happens so sporadically that I have a hard time training replacements and, like childbirth, once the pain is over with there's a curious amnesia that sets in. I don't know how to stop. The company is as much a part of me as I am of it. So here I am again, humping through the world in a Ryder truck, swaddled in scarves and gloves, driving through the night and living on Sun Chips and M&Ms.

Why do we do this? Another answer occurred to me this morning. After the cluster fuck of a show yesterday, a core group of us sat in my partners' room drinking some kind of midwest beer and talking a mile a minute until about 3:30 this morning. We were loud and laughed until we could barely feel our face muscles any more. We discussed the show of course but it rapidly went back to old tours, antics on the road, things we've all collectively seen, done or heard about. People we've worked with over the years. Stories about hijinks, near misses, whacked out personalities, and always the stories about hookups on the road, who's done what with whom.

The stories are great. Laying down sheets of PVC film in a hotel hallway and creating an olive oil slip 'n' slide in Texas. Skinny dipping stories abound -- in the Gulf of Mexico, in various pools (with and without pool covers), in any puddle large enough to justify ripping off clothing and jumping in. (The skinny dipping is a particular art form that two of our members have perfected... they now make it a mission to jump into at least one body of water per tour). Stories that revolve around people, mainly. And the quirky fabulous things that people do when stuck with each other in unusual circumstances for a prolonged period of time.

And I realized that there was a new answer to the "why do we do this?" question. It's because of the stories. The stories give this thing life and justification and release. The stories help us decompress and hold our sides with laughter. The stories are our legend and the glue that will bond us together for many years, long after the company has disbanded.

During yesterday's train wreck, I just sat there and tried to breathe and get through it. And as I did I realized two things: The show does go on, and an answer ALWAYS comes. The answer may not be "Ah ha, now I know how to run the light board." It could be "ah ha, if we can turn the house lights up and the stage lights up it'll look like shit but at least they'll be able to see the stage." It could be "if we make a ton of changes and sacrifices this is a way we'll survive." But the answer always comes.

Why do we do this show called life? It's not just because we don't know how to stop. It really is about the stories. It's about who is doing what with whom and what disasters we've skirted and how we've made it through another near miss. And at the end of the day, we huddle with the closest members of our tribe and remember and define ourselves with love, with laughter, and with the fondest of memories about the very worst situations.

# posted by Katherine Shirek Doughtie @ 7:54 AM 2 comments

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

The Ups and Downs of Dating

The day before I got dumped last week, I had an extremely enlightening ride in the elevator. I was in my office building, on the 19th floor, when this kind of crazy haired lumbering guy lurched to a stop outside the closing doors. My co-rider politely stuck her hand out and opened the doors for him, whereupon he lurched into the car and started talking.

"Did you see the up and down arrows out there? They're burned out. I mean, I didn't see them. Have you seen them recently? All of them are burning out. I never know which way an elevator is going to go any more. With my luck, it's always going the way I don't want to go. Like, I'm surprised this is going down because, you know me, if I want to go down, the elevator is always going up. I've stopped even going into an elevator if I haven't pushed the buttons first. I mean, you never know which way it's going to go, but if you've pushed the button at least you can pretend that it's the one you called for. Still, with my luck, it's always going to be going the wrong way. And, of course, I'm always getting stuck. That's the way it goes with me. I've been stuck three times in these elevators. These elevators just don't like me."

For 19 floors, out the front doors, and all the way to the parking structure I heard this. I was nice and laughing along, but by the time we mercifully parted ways, all I could think was "what a bozo."

Since I was on my way to therapy, and figured I'd get a jump start on the whole metaphor thing, I was thinking about this guy as I got on the freeway and started driving. It was like traffic and my ex-boyfriend, I thought suddenly. This guy and I could be on the same freeway at the same time... and he'd call me up, pissed as hell, frustrated as can be, because he was stuck in traffic. And I wouldn't be. I'd be sailing along. But wherever this guy was, there was traffic. Mainly, I more than suspected, because he was always stressing about the traffic and it infuriated him no end to find himself in it.

Just like my ex-boyfriend, the elevator guy was just sure as can be that every elevator he was on was going to be going the wrong way. This was his identity. This is what separated him out from every other goon on the planet. And the times it went right didn't matter, because it didn't prove his point.

Of course, I felt lofty and serene pity for these poor mortals because -- after a week of lovely dating after the initial great blind date -- I was heading down the slippery slope of a glorious infatuation. We'd been talking or emailing daily, we'd had lunch, a movie and a great dinner in the course of a week. We had plans for the following Saturday to see a play. "When it works, it works," I told my girlfriends, with a happy laugh.

It had been so long since it had worked.

It was so incredibly great.

And, at the same time, I heeded the warning of the elevator guy. I don't have issues with my elevators. And I don't have issues with the traffic. I'm a pretty easy going girl when it comes to a lot of things. But I do have my areas of self-definition. And relationship is definitely one of them.

It's been a... umm... fallow time in the fields of fraternization. It's been a time of, well, regrouping. Reflecting. And, right, processing. Readying myself for the next thing. Which, really... really... hasn't been appearing on the horizon with any great frequency.

Or...

really...

at all.

For, like, ever.

You know when you're in a really hot relationship and the guy goes away for awhile and you go into work and say, MAN, I haven't been laid in TWO WEEKS. And everyone just groans. And you know how married people -- even married people -- get it at least once a month or so. And you know the Woody Allen joke -- How often do you have sex? Him: Never, like two/three times a week. Her: All the time, like two/three times a week.

This has not been like that.

This is six-months-between-kisses slow. Last calendar year was the worst it's ever been, in terms of intimate encounters, since the mid 1970s. Sex, like all out grunting sweaty sex? A distant memory. Sex with someone I'm madly in love with, with full connection and drug love and all the rest? ... I need my Alzheimer's deep memory retention to go back that far.

So, me being me, I have my stories about me and relationships. I mean, I kind of actually DID write the book. I come by my stories honestly, and I know that. And I also know that stories can be dangerous.

So I was guarding with all my might against jinxing this new thing with my cynical stories. When he didn't call, I just thought, in my Buddhist way, "Oh, he's not calling. It means nothing except he's not calling."

When I didn't hear from him for a day, I thought, after I chanted a bit, "Oh, that is fine. In the real reality, he is simply silent. It has nothing to do with me."

And when I started wanting to spin off paranoid fantasies of some ex-girlfriend coming back into his life, sweeping him off his feet, and he is conflicted, can't make the choice, but of course he finally does... and it's with her, and not me... again.... I dismiss those thoughts as old elevator stories. My elevators always take me the way I want to go because I don't think about them too much. And relationships can do the same, as long as I don't overthink them.

I did all of it right, except this time it was true. On Wednesday the email came: ex girlfriend, unfinished biz, have to see it out, sorry. No matter how much I scripted or descripted the scenario beforehand, I was still faced with the same old ugly truth: my elevator was going the wrong way. Again. You know me.

So what does this mean? It means I had very few choices in how to deal with the matter, but the ones I made are critically important. I could choose to be gracious and kind to him, and understand that sometimes life is complex. I could choose to accept that this has happened, give myself over to some old-fashioned wallowing, eat some cookie dough, and enjoy the knowledge that time is a great anesthetic. And I could choose to not use the word "again," ever, when describing the situation to myself in my head.

Yes, I got dumped. Yes, the "poof" factor has reared its head. Of my many superpowers in life is to indeed attract men who have other women as their first priorities. AND... it doesn't have to turn into an elevator story. It doesn't have to be something I only notice when it proves my point, and thus secretly relish. I don't have to only snort in self-derisive triumph when it happens again.

I can keep it simple and acknowledge that the path has changed. The path always changes. And sometimes the lights signalling the way you should go are burned out, and sometimes they're not. Either way, the goal is to just try to learn what you can from the ride. And if it's going in the wrong direction, then maybe you can dig in and learn even more. About yourself, about your expectations, and about the serendipity of the world.

# posted by Katherine Shirek Doughtie @ 9:14 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Dividing by Zero

I was just forwarded such a great essay that I'm inpsired to share it with you this way, rather than just sending everyone the link. It's called Death and Underachievement: A Guide to Happiness at Work.

The basic premise is that our efforts to make ourselves happy usually are so extreme that they make us unhappy. The greater the energy we outpour to achieve what we think are "the right goals," the more fatigued we are, and the less time we have for what is the ultimate goal -- which is to live our lives fully while we're here on the planet.

You can read it for yourself... please do. And when you're done, this is my take on it. It's not a whole lot different from what the Buddhists and other eastern practictioners have been saying for centuries. Suffering is what happens when what (A) we think should be reality doesn't jive with (B) what is reality. Our little brains latch on to that disconnect and we spin around like little rats on a treadmill, working ourselves into a frenzy trying to make A look like B. The more A doesn't look like B, the more crazy we get.

Here's a perfect case in point. I went on a blind date last night. This is something I entered into willingly and (before we got too close to the actual hour of meeting) with a good dose of happy anticipation.

But as the clock neared the fateful meeting hour, the anxiety and unhappiness about the whole thing went exponential. I stressed about every single way this thing could go horribly wrong.

I stressed about where to meet him. I stressed about parking. I stressed about sounding too pushy. I stressed about sounding too passive. I stressed about my nails (like anything could be done to fix them). I stressed about my lifestyle, my job, my kids, my dog, my body, my way of talking, my way of thinking.

I screamed at myself to not say anything too revealing, to keep up my boundaries, to be more vulnerable, to act sophisticated, to act naive, to act smart, to act innocent, to not mention old relationships, to discuss what I've learned from previous relationships, to not talk about relationships at all, to not talk about my passions at all, to not talk about anything at all but to -- above all -- be interesting and be a good listener. In essence, the pep talk I was giving myself was to eradicate all aspects of my personality, try to be invisible, and... really... to just survive the night because nothing could be worse that what I was about to put myself through.

Seriously. If that isn't suffering... what is?

I forced myself to do a 30 minute sitting meditation somewhere during the day to shut my stupid brain up. Because I realized, somewhere amongst the chatter, that all the things I was worried about have actually no relationship to anything in reality.

In reality, I talk a lot. In reality, I write a lot. In reality, I'm opinionated. In reality, I'm just ... me. As Popeye would say, I yam what I yam.

What I was making myself totally crazy with was the disconnect between what I thought I should be (someone, well, else) and what I am. I was trying to avoid perceived judgment, without stopping for a moment to realize that the judgment has nothing to do with anyone but the judger. If he thinks my nails suck... that's OK. It doesn't mean my nails suck. It doesn't mean my nails don't suck. It just means he thinks my nails suck.

Who cares?

Nor did the possibility enter my mind that the guy could be not whom I am looking for. Maybe he'll have some annoying little tic that reminds me of some ex's other annoying little tic. Nothing to do with him, but a complete deal-breaker for me. He may have a myriad other things going on within himself that have nothing -- nothing -- to do with my nails, or shoes, or hair. And finally, anyone who is going to judge me even remotely as harshly as I was judging myself is no one I would ever want to be with anyway.

None of that entered into the conversation I was having with myself. It was all about the suffering and the need for me to match non-reality A with reality B.

So where does the craziness come from? It comes from the past and the future. From critical voices of parents and media ads to hopes and dreams and fairy-dust. It has nothing to do with the present. The present is like a mountain pinnacle... surrounded with space and air and light. This concept of "past" and "future" are meaningless up there. They have nothing to do with the view, with the sense of aching vastness, with the clarity of the breeze.

The past and the future do not exist.

Not up there. Not down here. Actually, not anywhere.

Which means striving for something in the future, and placing your present joy on hold while you do so, is like striving to divide by zero. It's a meaningless concept. If you are unhappy now, by definition: you are unhappy. Period.

I'm certainly not the first to come up with these thoughts, but the essay made me realize there's another way of looking at them. If striving for perfection later is making your life imperfect now... think about it. Because changing something now is do-able. Even if all that takes is just introducing yourself to actual reality and making friends a little bit with it. The fact was that I was about to have dinner on New Year's Eve. Which sounded like fun. (And it was.) And all the rest of it was just garbage that never needed to be dealt with because it was the rat on the treadmill, convinced that it could transcend reality if it just worked harder.

I'm not advocating not planning.

I'm not advocating giving up.

I'm certainly not advocating not giving a shit.

On the contrary... I'm suggesting we care more. About what's going on right now. And that starts by removing that sense of success being just around the corner.

So this year of the rat, I suggest that we give up that treadmill. Let's not lock into that frenzy of expectation and dissillusionment. Let's ditch the idea that if we just work a little bit harder we can make what we'd like to be reality match up with reality itself.

No treadmill. No resolutions to be "better." No nothing... except the occasional nod to the things that are, and a whispered thanks for being there.

# posted by Katherine Shirek Doughtie @ 6:53 PM 1 comments