In paying attention to mood and self and allowing myself the freedom to drift about, I allow myself to be a little proud of miniature battles hard fought and won. In plain language, I could have easily let the night slip away in to surfing the net, swiping profiles, lamenting circumstances, or any other number of ways to pass the time. Instead, I sat down to read with Nick by my side and was pleasantly rewarded.
In this time of little structure, I’m trying to live more freely. I spent my morning writing and trying to get at a proper justification for doing whatever it is that I’ve been doing on here. Admittedly, I was happy with drawing the conclusions of what we seek in life to those early childhood games – the thrill of being found.
In some respects, I’ve realized that is my current approach to romantic relationships. With respect to my ex-fiancee, I’ve been hiding in plain sight. She finds me once in a while, but usually just to yell at me for hiding in the closet where I’m not supposed to go (sorry, just having fun with the extended metaphor there). In the case of pursuing someone else, I have no interest in the actual pursuit – I’d be fine if someone found me, and to that end, I can signal that I’m available, but that seems like it’s about all I’m willing to do.
After writing and thinking about peek-a-boo, I set about looking for jobs. For the most part, it was a disappointing search. the bright spot is that I have a phone screening on Friday. Unfortunately, much like looking through dating profiles, looking for jobs that fit (and not finding many) can be a downer.
I didn’t really get around to exercising, but I tried yoga for the first time… Man, I am not very flexible. I also found some areas where I have pretty limited or strained movement (right wrist, shoulders, neck).
For whatever reason, I found myself reading another series of texts…An up and down few days before we ran our half-marathon. While it was mostly up, the down part came when we were doing a daily check-in – it was our homework for therapy. We had had a phone call for the check-in (though the instructions were to only do them in person). It didn’t go well. Every check-in until that point had been positive, and this was the first one where I said I felt good about x, but y was bothering me a little bit. My ex got upset and said she didn’t want to do check-ins anymore – it’s not the type of relationship she wanted where everything was analyzed and every change monitored. It wasn’t exactly the type of relationship I was striving for, but the homework was supposed to be about practicing being able to talk about things if they were weighing on us. We worked through it pretty well and saw the value of only doing check-ins in person… Again after re-reading, I was struck by how much wasted energy went in to those things. In hindsight, it seems entirely avoidable – I can’t even imagine squabbling over those things now.
As for the reward I got for reading tonight, it was an essay on abstract poetry – something I don’t care for very much. It concluded with a somewhat abstract poem that I really enjoyed – “Crossing Over” by William Meredith:
It was now early spring, and the river was swollen and turbulent: great cakes of floating ice were swinging heavily to and fro in the turbid waters. Owing to a peculiar form of the shore, on the Kentucky side, the land bending far out into the water, the ice had been lodged and detained in great quantities, and the narrow channel which swept round the bend was full of ice, piled one cake over another, thus forming a temporary barrier to the descending ice, which lodged, and formed a great undulating raft… Eliza stood, for a moment, contemplating this unfavorable aspect of things.
—Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
That’s what love is like. The whole river
is melting. We skim along in great peril,having to move faster than ice goes under
and still find foothold in the soft floe.We are one another’s floe. Each displaces the weight
of his own need. I am fat as a bloodhound,hold me up. I won’t hurt you. Though I bay,
I would swim with you on my back until the coldseeped into my heart. We are committed, we
are going across this river willy-nilly.No one, black or white, is free in Kentucky,
old gravity owns everybody. We’re weighty.I contemplate this unfavorable aspect of things.
Where is something solid? Only you and me.Has anyone ever been to Ohio?
Do the people there stand firmly on icebergs?Here all we have is love, a great undulating
raft, melting steadily. We go out on itanyhow. I love you, I love this fool’s walk.
The thing we have to learn is how to walk light.
There is a wisdom in this poem. In the text kerfuffle over the check-in, my ex suggested that every single day I found something to dislike and that all I ever did was look for problems. She was prone to that type of language (every single day) and I had to correct her and point out it was the first check-in that wasn’t 100% positive and reaffirming. I said I can’t be 100% positive 100% of the time, nobody can, and I asked if she needed a relationship that had nothing to work on, nothing to discuss? I didn’t expect these two readings (the text and the poem) to fit together like this. Meredith gets it right… love is a great undulating raft, melting steadily. It is always shifting and we needed to learn how to walk light. I think deep down, me ex-fiancee and I both understood this. She talked of wanting to be softer in those heated moments and that she needed to get more practiced at it – negativity made her feel overwhelmed. We were learning to displace the weight of our own needs…. Dunn’s essay concludes by saying, “it is a poem that only could have been written by someone who has assimilated many loves, many failures, who knows ‘We go out on it anyhow’ is both courage and, in a Sisyphean sense, all we can do.” The assimilation of success and failure, the balance struck by walking light. These are things only arrived at by sitting with the failures a bit. This is my primary issue with things like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy – the notion of just move on. Maybe I just prefer the fool’s walk or as Adrienne Rich put it, going the hard way. Towards the end of his essay Dunn asks and then answers, “How does one learn to write a poem like this? One doesn’t. One lives awhile, practices one’s craft, waits for some convergence of subject, self, and talent.” He concludes, “We don’t stop loving because of the difficulties.”
Tonight, I may have lacked talent, but there was a nice convergence of subject and self.