It’s Messy

Over and over again the message that I have no control over other people’s decisions bats me on the nose. What was perfectionism in me wanted to become the director of my life. I pushed it away. I had to I was working in theater where deadlines trump perfection. But the relentless deadlines did something to me, though they dismantled perfection they also drove me to blindly hurtle through a series of crises without allowing for recovery. This driving was a form of breaking. I no longer had control. My boundaries were violated routinely. So, I said, no more.

Maybe I’m retreading old ground. In my experience every time a path is re-walked it becomes a different one by virtue of the experience gained from the first time. If I can go through this mindfully, without focusing so much on myself, perhaps this struggle will end. What I mean is this life long struggle to know my calling.

I know I’m called.

But I don’t know where.

I harbored envy toward those who seemed to know better what they were doing. Those who seemed to be prospering without the amount of struggle I experience. This envy has been with me for a very long time. I see that now. Its anger has kept me from enjoying people. Intellectually I see this but my emotions are lagging. So I struggle to be around my “successful” friends. I want to be a good friend. My wound gets in the way.

At this point confession is the only remedy.

So yes, I have been a jerk because I wished that my life were easier the way I think yours is. I have been a jerk because I wanted control over things that I have no business controlling. I’ve also been a jerk for hiding my thoughts and feelings, which lead me to mutter things under my breath and maybe say inappropriate things to people you don’t even know.

I didn’t want all of this to come out in the heat of some emotional upheaval. So to exercise the little control I do have I write this. By posting it publicly I know strangers will read this, and they should. Some of my deepest hostilities have been directed toward strangers, innocent people who have no idea why I’m so angry.

I will continue to struggle with this. In the struggle love and empathy are born.

It’s messy.

Help Me But I Can’t Tell You How

Was it really only two months ago that I left? I feel like more time should go by that I should sleep a whole lot more before embarking on anything again. But by the second week of empty freedom I knew it couldn’t be long before I would try again.

All the good that has ever come from me was not me. My efforts always fell flat. They were less than worthy.

The thing I realize now is that I can’t forget my heritage nor should I. My heritage is to heal, to repair; all that I dream of is refuge and healing. In all my little problems and wanderings I find myself in the role of wise councilor. Had I ever listened to myself, I might know what to do with myself now.

There is music in the back of my head so faint when I listen hard it goes away. It worries me.

For me passion has been hard to define. It was so close to me enveloping me it was the air the earth and I couldn’t name it. It woke me in the dead of night it was suggestive it played with my hair and I couldn’t hear it. It burrowed deep down to the core of my being it fought my decisions and I felt it. No, it is still an unexplainable thing and I call it love.

Love is never what you think it is.

Those boys seem squint faced now. I don’t understand. The day I caught them fighting their eyes had been round. I had seen clearly what had happened but I couldn’t touch the core the secret that hung between them. They refused to talk. My powerful imagination wanted to fill in the blanks to tell the whole story. Maybe, maybe they, but I stopped my conscious self. There’s no way I can know if they won’t talk.

In the night the images and thoughts went round and round. They tried to fill in, to solve, fix, heal the situation but what could I really do? I didn’t have any answer.

The same is true for my friend who was placed under my special care through circumstances I wish had never happened. In my mind I tried the impossible to know what I couldn’t know. Of course I failed. When we are commanded to heal the sick it’s not what you think. We are given power but we cannot possess it. When we are assigned people to love there will be pain. It isn’t our love that is spent just as it isn’t our personal power that heals.

I struggle to let go. Leave the real work where it belongs. To be only the conduit of divine light not the possessor of it. I’m leaky.

I also need the light to be on me. I am wretched without it. Hard and lonely places have been my lot for decades, yeah, I can say that now, decades. I have fought and come out bloody ever time but never really healed. Not completely anyway.

The truth,

The truth is, spiritually I was the one who refuses to quit the one that would die on a battle field but had never learned when to ask for help. That’s what I was, a Loan Ranger. Hah! What was I blind?

I know that I need. I know that I am weak. I still don’t ask enough. I wander from place to place seeing if eyes will meet mine if hands will reach out to lift me up. The reason I can’t ask as much as I should is twofold. First I am out of practice. More importantly though is the words. There are no words when the opportunity comes.

“Help me but I can’t tell you how” is a frustrating message to deliver. I struggle with it. It hurts me that I have a hard time saying out loud what I need, because without this communication I will never heal.

Courage

Lately, like for the past year or so, I’ve had a mild obsession with the concept of courage.

I think it’s because I sometimes feel stuck about what I’m doing. I think of a plan and then have no idea how to make it happen. All the advice out there is, “just do it” but no one really says, this is the way to do it. So I’m stuck. 

I’m not the kind of person who tries a lot of things blindly.

At the root of all fear is a thought. It isn’t the same thought for all fears. Physical fear is all about, “Oh no, this series of events is leading to death, runnnn!” Social fear says, “These people are hostile and will kill me, runnnn!” I think those are the main types of fear and they all are concerned with preservation of life. Somehow we think life is our responsibility to preserve. Yet I wonder about that.

Let’s paint an ideal picture. This is not how things are but how they ought to be. If I am unconcerned with my social preservation and focus on yours and you are doing the same for me then we are sharing the burden of living here. So the answer is not try harder on my own account but to do better on yours. I think constantly self-advocating is exhausting, I’d rather have someone advocate for me. I don’t find advocating for others to be quite so taxing. This is a sustainable model. 

In the back of our heads there’s this little worry creature that likes to remind us that other people fail. In fact it also tells us that we fail therefore others will fail. This creature is telling you facts based on experience. Facts based on experience are impossible to ignore. Nor should you ignore them. Interesting point though, you happen to be alive and somewhat rational, past failures haven’t been terminal. So, why this ginormous emotional impact, this thing that makes us skittish around the scene of our past mistakes? 

Our culture, society, has sent us messages of dire inadequacy from before our births. But am I blaming culture? I don’t know. Education is a powerful thing that works against these messages. If we cultivate the ability to analyze messages to get at the root communication then we are able to deal with the root causes of everything.

I’ll go with a perennial hot button issue to illustrate my point, gun control. Ok, so every three years or so some broken messed up man goes and shoots out a school, or mall, or whatever and there’s this huge reaction, as there should be. We have people wanting to ban all guns, we have people arguing about the guns role in the incident. They focus on the guns because really the thing that will stop these types of killings isn’t the absence of the tool but the healing of the person, and that is way out of our control.  No one can guarantee healing for another person. I’m sure in all the massacres there were signs that it was coming but the individual was too isolated for us to notice.

Now if we were conditioned to notice things could have been managed better. I’m not saying that all murder will cease, but I am saying that it would be better to heal the person before they do a mass job thus reducing the occurrence of these events, leaving society with another productive individual. This is something the government alone cannot handle. This is something that each of us must take part in.

Why can’t just the government handle this you ask? Good question. Let’s be realistic, what can the government do about your attitude? Honestly, nothing. It’s our attitudes that isolate us. See if I’m thinking, “not my problem” or “that’s not worth my attention” or “my problems are more important” I blind myself to the person falling apart next to me. People hate being outcast, ignored. It’s a biological thing.

Obviously I can’t be deeply involved in everyone’s life. That’s just impossible. I’m human. But each one of us has been “assigned” a group of people to care for, if you will. If I blind myself to my people and they fall apart I am affected, because destruction happens.

I think courage has something to do with asking for help. Not me telling you, you need help, but me asking for it even when I think you think I have it all together. It, whatever, is all scattered out there. I don't know exactly what I'm doing, I'm not sure what I need, but I do need friends. Ones who will go questing with me to find the answers.

About Quitting

2" By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. 3 Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done." Genesis 2:2-3(NIV)

10 “For six years you are to sow your fields and harvest the crops, 11 but during the seventh year let the land lie unplowed and unused. Then the poor among your people may get food from it, and the wild animals may eat what is left. Do the same with your vineyard and your olive grove.” Exodus 23:10-11 (NIV)

Recently I quit my job. It was interesting to see my coworkers’ reactions. Every one of them secretly wished they could do what I am doing, just stop and not work for a while. 

My two favorite reactions were these; one actor openly admitted he was jealous and wanted to do what I am doing and the other went straight into telling me, “it’s a hard job marked out there…” I highlight these because the honest one was a bit of fresh air, no digging through subtext, but the worried one was more typical of how people respond to hearing that I don’t have a project lined up to jump into.

What the phrase, “it’s a hard job market,” really says is that, I should stay in this situation because it is a sure thing. What it does not take into account is my real situation. What the person who said this does not know is that staying, at this point, is way more dangerous than going. Yes, I work hard and I do a good job but the parade of crises I have been managing for the past two and a half years has left me depleted. There has been no recovery time. 

As a fighter I know that training should be challenging and sometimes hard but that rest and recovery are equally important to achieving the lasting goal of success. In work and personal relationships the same is true; there must be times of renewal. Without renewal I am dangerous because now I cannot be present to the circumstances that are actually in front me. I am too busy nursing old wounds and too distressed to properly care for the new ones. I am also unable to care for anyone else’s wounds and am more likely to lash out and wound others both emotionally and physically (you don’t know how many times I nearly punch someone in the gut).

In the environment that we were working in this was not a good position to be in. 

I have learned a lot about myself through all of this, that I need a good network of friends who can support me through these hard times, that sometimes it is better to be broke than broken, and that we all put way too much pressure on ourselves to be perfect. I have become very pragmatic, or cynical (I’m not sure), about perfection. I realized within the last few months that, though I am not living my ideal life I am living someone’s ideal life, and within the past year or so I have come to believe that we humans have no clue what perfection really looks like. We actually may be living perfectly already but unaware of it because part of what it means to be a perfect human is to be flawed, or at least unique, which oddly we do not like right now.

This does not mean we stop trying to mature and become “better” people. It just means that it is ok to own your mistakes and immature habits as your starting point and to not put another layer of pressure on yourself because you are not what you want to be yet. All this beauty and maturity of character takes time and pain to develop. But there must be rest.

See, even God rested and that is a lesson to us. We were created to need rest so that there would be an opportunity for our community to carry us. On my own I am insecure and very weak but if my friend and family carry me I am powerful. With this support I can and have survived two and a half years of difficult work. With this same support I can do something new and equally good. The quest now is for healing and sustainability.

I do not know what that will look like yet. I do know that it will require a shift in professional focus. I cannot do what I have been doing for the past six years. It just took too much out of me. 

I have a desire to see people understand themselves and to forgive themselves as I have come to forgive myself and am beginning to understand myself. This is the beginning of healing and the true evidence of salvation, because forgiveness is the first step of love, and love is salvation.

Pride Based Anger

It’s not often that I write something and think; hey I could do a whole series of posts on this subject. But after the anger post I just did I realize that I may have started down a line of thinking that will take more time to fully explore. Why explore this publicly? Well we all get angry and I think we all bear a little anger at God. 

The funny thing about my experience is that my anger did not push me away from God. And though I was very upset he still blessed me and gave me good things that I did not deserve. I realize that my experience may not look like yours or anyone else’s.

Having said that let’s be honest, the anger has robed me of one thing I desperately wanted and needed and that was freedom to express joy. I was so preoccupied with trying to figure out a way out of my situation that I wasn’t fully present to those who needed me or to myself. That is a danger in anger.

(I just realized that danger is just anger with a d in front of it. Now I feel like a nerd. I also want to go down a tangent about the relationship between danger and anger. But that would be kind of confusing and really off topic, except I’ve gotten off already.)

Ah, anger. You know, it’s all wounded pride. Pride is a disregard, an ingratitude, toward all things even the self. It’s not arrogance. Arrogance is the thing that says, “I am and deserve the best.” Pride says, “You have done nothing for me.” or I suppose worse yet, “This is your fault.” Pride blames. Unfounded anger comes out as blame in the end. 

No wait let me back up. You need to understand that there are two angers. The pride based anger and righteous anger. All the above has nothing to do with righteous anger. That is an anger born out of true injustice and produces good. Whereas the pride based variety, when taken to extreme, ends in death, literally. Mine was pried based I know because of the things it prevented me from experiencing and because there was no real injustice in the situation. 

It would be so nice if I could just get over myself and not have to go through this struggle but that’s not how things are done here on earth. This is hard training.

More thoughts will come. This will take time to get through, probably a life time.