Two nights ago (Friday night), I hopped on a video chat with my friends. There were seven or eight of us on the call. It was nice to see faces and just do what we would have done at a party – which is drink and either hang around the kitchen or sit around outside and talk about whatever. Always trying to interject a little humor, I tried to stage my background with a subtle sign of the times. We had a lot of fun talking, more than I would have expected. I was up until about 1 or 2 in the morning with them – I think we’re going to do it again this week. A lot of people are rediscovering things that we’ve lost along the way. One of my favorite Beatles lines is from Fixing a Hole “I’m taking the time for a number of things that weren’t important yesterday.” People are going out to parks (one of the only places you can still go), they’re talking with friends and family, they’re listening to live streams of music. I hope that if some good comes out of this, that we find a way to hit a bit of a reset… de-emphasize commerce and the economy and consuming things and get back to people and decency and love.
Yesterday and last night were quite the opposite from Friday. I spent a fair amount of the day inside not doing much of anything. I worked on a poem “From a Distance” and started two other poems. I ordered some groceries with mild success. Eric, my shopper at Kroger was very communicative. I think he and I have texted more than some of the women I’ve dated. I might see if he’s single. Sadly, they are still out of quite a few things like meat and beans. I’ve been hoping to make a big meal that will give me lots of leftovers (bolognese or chili), but without some of the basic ingredients, I’ll have to be a bit more creative. I think tonight I’ll try a marinara sauce based on some stewed tomatoes, some sauce and some mirepoix. I can also order food, and plan to do that from time to time (my small part to help the local economy).
Speaking of the economy, I’d be lying if I wasn’t a bit concerned about the recession. It doesn’t matter how confident I am in my skills, I think the job market is going to be tough, and so much seems unpredictable. To some degree, burying my head in the sand has been a defense / preservation tactic. I’m afraid that whatever stimulus that could be coming our way will somehow exempt me. Suspending rent payments (for everyone but me). Money for the unemployed (all but me). This has been the timing of things in my life. I invested when I was younger and lost a bit in the tech bust. I bought a house just before the market crashed. I installed all new windows the one year that the government didn’t offer energy efficiency rebate…. I didn’t qualify for unemployment here because I haven’t lived in the state long enough. So I’m sure there’s some other goofy thing where money will be available to people who lost work because of the pandemic and not people who lost work beforehand. I am trying to see a potential plus side…. which is that the deck might get reshuffled a bit, maybe new opportunities will open up, things I hadn’t been thinking of. CNN was reporting that the nonprofit sector might get hit pretty hard as they don’t operate like traditional businesses and can barely pay their employees as is. I also worry that the reshuffling will be to the advantage of the people who already have money. Almost every opportunity goes to the wealthy first, and then the rest of us can get in on it. When hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, wealthy people bought up a lot of the devalued land. The fact is, people of means can ride out these storms, and when there are 0% interest rates, they will have more buying power and will qualify to borrow a lot more and will squeeze out the small business owner. It was how Amazon crushed the small bookstore (ran a massive deficit for many years).
An odd feeling hit me as I talked with my friends the other night. I’ve written that my ex-fiancee, B, is seldom far from my thoughts, and I’ve tried to explain what that means or looks like. And yes, plenty of times I wonder if she ever thinks about me (Robert Frost wrote “Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired”). And that then makes me think about the stupid games people play and her boyfriend’s comments about giving her the satisfaction (and safety) of knowing someone out there (me) feels that way about her, etc. etc. I’ve tried to consider how and if it’s holding me back, but also how it might be propelling me forward. I’ve tried to look at it without judgment and simply say it is. Talking with my friends, I found myself really wishing she and I could talk. It’s a feeling I haven’t been able to shake over the last day or so. Maybe it’s the pandemic and the checking in on everybody. I want to know how she’s doing, how her family is doing. I want to have a normal conversation. Not about who did what or how it got messed up, or whether I still think we could make it… but just about what are you up to and how do you spend your days? I’m seldom afraid to examine my motives, to allow for a soup of motives to drive certain actions. I know she has, at times, read this blog… and I have to allow that some of my daily writing might be motivated by a desire to keep her informed or connected (if she wanted it). Early on, I wrote a lot about feeling like the way things ended stripped me of my voice and that I was going to write in an effort to find that voice, take ownership of it. To some degree, I have been doing that. In some respects, this has been a long conversation with the void that was left. Sometimes, I wonder if I’ve also been trying to model the behavior I would like – sharing my day-to-day in hopes that it’s one day reciprocated. To pinpoint any one motive is pretty difficult, like I said, I suspect it’s a soup of things.
I’m not sure what to do about this renewed sense of longing, this desire for a type of normalcy that we had. To some degree, I feel like I shouldn’t do anything with it. I don’t act on it in any way, and just sit with it and let it be until it is no longer. It was there as I went to sleep last night, and for a few minutes, I tried hard to think about exactly what was going on (mentally). The closest I could come was that it’s almost like performing a self-check. I can’t say for sure whether or not I want to move on – it would be reductive to be definitive one way or another. What I can say is that from time to time, I check to see if I have moved on, or how far I’ve come in moving on. I ask myself could I still imagine doing x, y, or z with this person? If this person were back in my life, would I be happy with them? The problem is, that when the answer is yes, you find out by doing exactly that, imagining. There are times that I sit and write and can imagine her over on the sofa with the dog reading articles on her phone. There are times I can imagine just having normal conversations about anything and everything. It was nice to connect with my friends, but she was my best friend. For me, it was a pretty strong connection – one that sparked the imagination, one that had an everyday warmth and comfort to it, and so I want to know what she’s reading, how she’s getting by in these tough times, how the job is going, does she have a favorite park or part of town, what does she want to do a year or three years from now… I know she can’t be the source of that daily bread, but that’s only because she can no longer imagine it. I can’t say if being able to think this way is a good or bad thing. I know that as I went through my divorce, and after we were apart, I was in a very different place. I couldn’t imagine us together anymore. Which, of course, leaves me with other questions – like why is this so different? And if I got there then, I assume B might feel the same way about me.
As I tried to go to sleep, the imagining became pretty real and made me restless. Enough so that I turned back to the practice of meditation and focused on breathing and clearing my mind. It was a little successful – I got caught up in a thought loop in which I asked myself isn’t any meditation the concentrated thought on a particular subject? Wasn’t I, to some degree, already meditating? Aren’t I currently meditating on meditating? It worked in so far as I was no longer thinking about B, and then I fell asleep.
As I write all of this, I’m thinking of taking a break from the blog, or at the very least, trying to get a bit more clarity on my motivations. Throughout, I’ve been uncomfortable with the navel gazing. However, I think I’ve become a better writer because of the introspection. I often come back to how I define letting go – which is being able to look at things, feel deeply and still move through (however slowly that movement might be). Acceptance is just that, an acceptance of what is – without judgment, without denying, without seeking. When I first went down this road, I felt a little pathetic about “putting it all out there.” I felt like maybe I was just looking for pity… or that maybe I was trying to create a false sense of strength. After nearly a year – a lot of contradictory feelings still exist, but I feel like I am much more able to call them out by name. This is longing, and it’s ok. This is jealousy, and it’s ok. Which really sounds like a lot of BS self-help / self-talk / self-affirmation “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and dammit, people like me…”
I’m no great writer (statement of fact – not fishing for anything). I take some solace that in the history of writing, much better writers have grappled with all of these things: motivations, feelings, loss, pettiness, anger, deep love, happiness, memories, and the psychology and introspection that goes with all of it. Knowing this makes me think all of it is ok. I don’t hurt anyone with my thoughts and words (at least I try not to) and I always strive for understanding – of self and other. I don’t care if it seems pathetic, or if I seem stuck, or if I express a very temporary sensation: love, longing, frustration, etc. etc. A few days ago I quoted Maria Popova on the importance of the stories we tell ourselves… I write about those stories with an eye toward clarity and what it means to live a full and rich life complete with everything that entails.