Friends Forever?

'What kind of friend are you?' Disappointment and hurt bit in his text. I felt guilty. My betrayal, my inconsiderateness, sat uneasily. I still stew. I felt ill. Yet my reaction to being called to task is reflexive; I've so many excuses! Where I grew up the consequences for actions were hardly ever worth the price of honesty! One learned to conceal, never (ever) to rat, to reveal. Still, since being utterly perfect was always impossible, I gradually learned to accept others' flaws too.

'What kind of friend are you?' Well, what of him? Actions and interests that he might've shown me ought to've been more-better, more considerate, more.....  But I know it's not really him; it is me. I am guilty. And I've failed others too, in fact, in all of the 'deadly vices'. Even in my seventh decade I’m yet to master all moments to be 'perfect,' conscious of intentionality as I may be.

My greed is too big. Because of it I have excluded others, marginalized others, seen to it that I ‘get’, even when they don't. And yes, there is in me a desire for more. I purchase things beyond my possible rate of consumption. I seek things out that I do not really need. But at the very least, when challenged about my selfish wants, I'll apologize, and offer to share, or to amend.

My arrogance prevents me being humble enough. I grow impatient with slow talk, with idle talk, with chit-chat, with what I deem non-productive or time wasting. As such, I find those who do not offer much energy toward the exploration of life (as an alternative to a recounting of it,) of less immediate value than my own cares. (But I do try to allow for each to simply ‘be as they be’.)

My laziness hurts me, and others. I do not letter-write nearly as much as I should. I do not make the effort to attend social venues, funerals, meetings, or obligations as I might. Nor do I paint all the ideas that come to mind, or write down many thoughts. I all too often do not follow up on idle promises: "See you soon!" But at least, when questioned, I'll own up, and try to make amends.

Intractability occasionally creates insufficient room for me to check on myself. l can on quite rare occasions 'lose it.' Some sort of atavistic rage takes over and I simply don't give a damn about the results of my actions, such that I might swear in public, or kick a can, or even say ugly things. But I'll apologize soon as I realize it. And certainly, I will pay for any damages. Certainly.

My survival instincts do not take into sufficient account the presence of others. I can at times neglect to ask if anyone else would like the last chocolate. I will take more than my share. Yet when caught, I'll do what I can to make amends, to provide for the other, to make it up to them.

My self-satisfaction does not always consider the needs of others. At times I’ve not given the necessary consideration toward my partner, or allowed for the subjectivity of an 'other'. When treating an ‘other’ as 'object,' I’ve taken from them or acted out of my selfishness. Yet, yes, sometimes I have amended. Still, should the record be revealed, there’d be many ‘wronged’.

My deceit is horrid. Most unconscionable of all, I've lied and cheated and stolen as I still grow up, intentionally. (Small things are as guilty as bigger ones.) One forgets a promise! One breaks integrity. One thinks one can get away with it, but conscience, that niggle of the evolving spirit, knows there is no release until one understands not only how to stop, but to forgive the self, and all others too.

'What kind of friend?' Imperfect. Fallible. Learning. Caring. Wanting to make amends. I am forgiving. I am inclusive, accepting, absorbing, assimilating and integrative. I want to improve, to get more-better. I want to help. I want to be interested, to show interest, to act from care. I want to be honest and clear and sincere and authentic. I need to make mistakes, yes, but hopefully ones of oversight, not intentionality. That's what kind of friend I am: Imperfect, always, but trying. You?

Being Busy

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

I am no Knight in Shining Armour. I’m no KISA. Rather, I’m a little like Sir Pellinore who creaks onto the stage of Camelot, rough-made wooden dog in tow (as I once directed it), presenting a pleasant but befuddled countenance of all. Sir Pellinore is in search of the Holy Grail. So am I. And while Pellinore settles into Camelot and at last has his creature comforts supplied for him while being inner-free, I needs perpetuate my nesting, yet one more time. It seems that nesting requires repetition after repetition. Besides the hauling of the life-long items of my accoutrements, there is the replacing of things life had needed at each pit-stop; a mattress; a barbecue; a TV; a vacuum cleaner; paint for the damaged wall; yet again the building of bookcases; yet again the acquiring of materials and fabrics and a shower rod and fixing plumbing and the making of a new bed frame. Yes, moving is an ongoing process until, well, until one has entirely moved. And then, for how long does one stay? And even while staying there is always so much ‘stuff’ to do! Indeed, it is as the Buddha says, “Before enlightenment, hauling water, chopping wood; after enlightenment, chopping wood, hauling water.” Yes, I am no KISA. I’ve no time to shine my armour. The pieces of it lie in little rust heaps behind me, o’er-looked on the long-past battlefields of my passage. Or put on shelves.

Sir Barry is dying. It is no easy passage. Lung cancer has him reduced to a man in a cave, the curtains drawn, his life curtailed to waking moments in which he may be distracted from his demise by the news on TV. No friends may visit. No socializing is permitted. He does not want to be remembered as the fallen knight. He knows that our love for him is for our memory of what he was, a knight in shining armour doing battle for others. Instrumental at the Council Table, an advocate for the least advantaged, and a man who tackled the problems of life with alacrity, with expertise, with energy and zeal, Sir Barry exemplified the KISA that we men try to be, the Knight in Shining Armour. But now he lies dying. And we may not see him. And his demise is a long-slow dreadful thing indeed, especially for his Lady Carolyn, his most beloved, beleaguered, and perpetually attendant M’Lady. 

Of what use the news to you? We all have friends who face death. We all have stories of ourselves and of others who are enduring the great passages of life, the battlefields that last a day, an hour, but are nevertheless battlefields indeed. Narrow escapes are just that; time contracted into a crack in the roadway over which one may trip into the face of oncoming traffic, except that one ‘just in time’ managed to avoid, to skirt, to o’er-leap, or to skip over the problem. And of what use bruiting it all abroad? Who needs to know? Why should it matter that Sister Carol has palliative patients who may drain all the love and care she can give, over and over, so that she learns to be a conduit between her God and his courtiers, giving and giving, and in her very giving finding fulfillment of her being; her natural calling. Did Mother Joan not find her husband’s long-hidden daughter to be an angel, indeed?

Question marks can go astray. We forget the thread of our connections to others. We forget why we’re doing something, writing something, reading something. What is that we’re looking for? Does one's Innesfree really exist within the context of the distractions and the busy-ness of living life itself? And even then, when found, as the poet says, there is work to do!

Indeed, with twins on the way; with a stroke to overcome; with an unexpected lay-off; with cancer at the foreground of worry; with persistent financial hardship; with the ravages of addiction always just at bay; friends carry their battle-swords at the ready, their armour sometimes not as polished as one may expect. We all are too busy! But we each are searching for Innesfree. And even then, when found, there’s still a lot of 'stuff', indeed, to do! Anon!       

An Annotated Anguish

Aden was a pleasant memory. And then things changed. Yesterday, March 04, 2016, I happened to note on the BBC news an article about the shootings, the brutality. So very different from my childhood memory of Aden, 1963. Yesterday, nineteen people in an old age home, many of them the caring nuns, were first handcuffed, and then shot in the head. Deliberately. And for me the horror of it, even so far away, continues to resonate. My souvenir of a beaded belt (on which Aden is spelt, kept all these 50 plus years,) hangs on the wall in my studio. It was a memoir of alien innocence. Now it is a memoir of alien sin. And sin, for me, is defined by intentional harm.

Lists of the brutal and bad people in our history are easily made. Hitler. Idi Amin. Pol Pot. Stalin. Among others. It is the intentional infamy behind their crimes that resonates. That, and the sheer amount of people they've affected. Will a Donald Trump be next? A surprising many are against Obama. Yes, history will show the record of a person’s progress. Boadicea. Eva Peron. Hillary Clinton. Alexander. Napoleon. Justin Trudeau. But what of the individual recruit or conscript into an Army that then threatens the family and welfare of all concerned with the inductee for disobedience? And what of individual actions by a single person forced to carry a bomb, a gun, carry out a horrific command? How does time treat that person, and why are so many intentionally harmful acts, evil acts, so readily committed and so easily forgotten? Who forces whom? What small acts do I not do?

Forgotten? Yes, it is now the 8^th day of March, 2016. Aden, for me, fell on March 04. Who recalls that ‘bit of news’? Who is there among those I know that are affected by this tragedy of handcuffing and shooting nuns and elders? Who knows of or has ever been to Aden? Who else 'feels' this tragedy?

Forgotten? Yes: “Boudica's husband Prasutagus ruled as a nominally independent ally of Rome and left his kingdom jointly to his daughters and the Roman emperor in his will. However, when he died his will was ignored, and the kingdom was annexed. Boudica was flogged, her daughters raped, and Roman financiers called in their loans.

In AD 60 or 61, when the Roman governor Gaius Suetonius Paulinus was campaigning on the island of Anglesey off the northwest coast of Wales, Boudica led the Iceni, the Trinovantes, and others in revolt.^[2]” ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudica

Time smudges on. Other things take our interest. We grow not necessarily indifferent, not really insensitive, not actually ignorant, but we grow accepting and including and absorbing and come to integrate all that happened and happens as part of the deal of living. The deal? Yes, there is nothing perfect, nothing absolute (except taxes and death), and there is nothing guaranteed. You live; ‘you takes yer chances.’ Oversensitivity (particularly in Dabrowskian terms) will cripple you. The daily news is too full of horror and pain and insuperable accounts of grim and gore. We are making history. It won’t ever be a verdant tapestry of paradise. The lion and the lamb and the dragon and the bear will not be friends.

I see through my father’s glasses. He died in 2004. I have the pair of spectacles that were taken off his fallen body and placed on a shelf. And just today, this morning, I fished them out for the first time from my own history and through his view saw my 1963 Aden belt yet again. Clearly. Dad and I were once there, in Aden, then in Egypt, then in... but who really cares? We see through our own eyes. And history, in the end, is the collective visions of mankind. We make of life as we will, until our own end. It’s an individual that must make choices. Now there’s challenge that can appear alien, indeed.

Kicked By Kindness

Falling off your pathway is like being kicked. It yanks you into imbalances. It forces reaction. The surprise is disintegrating. The unexpectedness is discombobulating. The hardship scatters your senses. Sensibility goes awry. It sucks. For who has not fallen? Who has never been kicked, emotionally, verbally, directly, metaphorically? It is not an advent reserved for the disfavoured, for the poor, for the malcontent, or for kings; it is a thing of chaos and disorder. No, it is not always dependent on consequence. It does not necessarily depend on one's own responsibility or actions. The kick comes at you unexpectedly, dealt by date; by circumstance; by chance. And what was, is no longer. The vicissitudes of life can verily vanquish its victims. (Say what?)

Yet not all are vanquished. (And not all are undeserving). There are many who see the advent of misfortune as an opportunity to redirect, to alter course, to adjust, accommodate, to flow with the go. There are many who'd make of their disintegration a positive thing.

Dabrowski (1981) has it that unless we take disintegration and make a hierarchical shift within it we in actuality only change the physical circumstances of our lives to better (or worse) but are in effect essentially unmoved within. We bring our old judgments and dissatisfactions and gripes and growlies with us; we are not really changed. The addition of more rooms to our house, or more zeros to our paycheques makes us happier, yes, but does not change our essence. We remain myopic or bigoted or racist or offensive or defensive or victimized or belligerent. The change we experienced was mostly material. We grew on a horizontal plane. We now may know more, have seen more, have been to more places, but are not fundamentally affected. We are what we are. As such, Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration dwells much on the dynamisms inherent in our being, and does not predict much for the potential of one who is not essentially auto-telic, or a person not passionate about self-direction, about meta-cognition.

A 2013 research report by Kaplan on Kahan and Nyhan about our collective brain-based reaction to our evolution comes in a short essay review at this link: http://www.alternet.org/media/most-depressing-discovery-about-brain-ever . It essentially states that we do not change, despite being giving the facts that contradict our present behaviours. We are so acculturated to the status quo that we hardly can become a unique individual; we hardly can break free from what everyone else is doing and thinking and being in our immediate society, if not our global one. Being ‘a child of the universe,’ as stated in Desiderata, does not quite do it for us. We see ourselves too much attendant on the doings-on of our own immediate Petri-dish. (No, a melt-down or two on the highway of life may not quite suffice. Nor, necessarily, will walking the St. James Way.)

When delivering the bad news to another, when directly responsible for implementing a change in their lives that might adversely affect them (or conversely make life yet more-better for their having to break from their obligation to an old paradigm), we give a kick that is disintegrating.... (So sorry, but may it turn out positively for you, truly!) At the end of it all, reaction might be tempered into response. And at the end of it all, no matter what, the direction one takes from the unexpected blow is up to you. You alone are the action, or the receiver, whether or not the ball is in your court. You alone make the lemonade from... And sometimes, even the kindness behind bad news can feel like a kick, indeed.

How to turn it into positive disintegration? Evolution itself is dependent on acquiring new habits. And evolution is dependent on change, one by one by one by two, by yet more. Always.

How're You, Really?

Three fundamentals attend us. The physical, the mental, the spiritual. Somewhere in the mix is the emotional. One feels sore, or adrift, or compacted. A blend of all? Conversely, one may feel fit, or alert, or alight. Physically, mentally, or spiritually, as the poet e.e.cummimgs would have it, "feeling is all." So it is that the question, "How are you?" is given in the moment, answered in the moment, or when shall one make the cut off? Over the last two weeks? Three months? Grief is given a span of mourning. Headaches are expected to last only for awhile. The flu takes one by surprise and can lay us up for several days. A car accident? A muscle pull? The break-up of teenagers, or of adults. The new dog. The new child. The new house. The excitement over the new.... Well, one gets the picture. So when the question arises, 'How are you?', it reaches one where one is at, right now.

In the old days (which most certainly was before electronic emails and texting, and when the phone call, especially long-distance, was a rare and privileged thing)... In the old days one wrote a letter and posted it, and waited and waited for the return. “How are you?” you'd ask. 'Well,' the answer would eventually come (at least almost a month later), 'well, we are doing fine. Only, I've got this headache, and when Barney said he'd put his foot down if I don't take an aspirin I told him to stop acting like a flamingo!' … So you'd write back: “Ha! Is your headache gone now?”

Yes, Barney's blarney was a long time ago. So too the results of the operation, or the job lay-off, or even the new bike that little Tike was so excited about. So, just how much should one reveal? Especially to persons not 'in the inner circle', persons who cannot relate, or persons not familiar with the passage of one’s life in general. What does one say? What does one want from relating to the other? Sympathy? Pity? An ongoing drain on their care? Does it really signify that I shall have dental surgery (oh my!) next Monday? Now I shall have to explain how extensive, the reasons why, and the wherefore and what for and... Ugh. I'm fine. I'm fine thanks. I'm fine.

Really fine (or bad) moments are best understood alone. One cannot possibly always have a cheering squad; an egging-on cadre of friends; a 'you can do it!' section of onlookers who give you the encouragement and persuasion that helps, yes, but really truly is not always there. It is in the dark small hours of persistent pain when no one else knows about it that one is most taxed. Of what use is chronic pain to anyone else then? No one gets to ‘feel good’ for their own feelings of sympathy. Or it is when the relatively few steps from the car to pick up milk in the grocery store, desperately hoping that nobody will bump into you, or waylay you, or expect you to stand (unsupported) in a queue while waiting to pay, that others do not appear understanding of the very tenuous thread of persistence that you're clutching to. They appear to do these things normally, casually, as though being free from a wheelchair is as life is meant to be. Pain that is not seen is entirely overlooked. Inner pain. Is that why we really wear black while we are in mourning, that others might give us respect for our heart-sore, be altogether more cautious and courteous and considerate? People treat those with canes and crutches and walkers differently. Doors are opened for them. Is that why we (generally) readily speak of our 'hundred aches and pains that the flesh is heir to'? We get more noticed? Yet the real step by step accretions of inner reserve and physical endurance, akin to one’s training for a marathon, are for the long distance runner, alone. One’s best pace is realized when one is, indeed, all alone.

All around us are people perpetually in and out of pain and disasters and misfortunes. All around us are people who have more, appear more happy, more confident, more engaged. It is the comparisons by which we most determine our degrees of discomfort. (When I was a little boy, as I recall, it took me several times to realize others do not feel as I feel, when I felt it. And as I grew up, I came to see that almost everything has a beginning, middle, and end. This too shall pass.) So then, you ask as I continue my own journey along the length of life's physical fire-walk, how am I doing? Well, I'm fine. I'm fine. Really, truly, thanks. I'm fine. Accreting. You? 

Fond Farewell, Friend?

Friends hug. Things come together. Or they fall apart. We write one another. Or we don't. And the months intervene to become years. There grows a disconnect. Especially if there is little sense of a real kismet. 'Kismet', it's a quality difficult to define, ineffable in its vicissitudes, perplexing in its perspicacity, and confounding in its coincidental(s). Ducks of a feather? Holland’s Theory? The subtleties of nature so deeply atavistic that we, like foreign tribesmen suspicious of our differences, our otherness, however subtle, are not prepared to breach the walls of personhood and simply flow with the other? Why do we not tick-tack? Too many others in our lives? Too many people we know, must share news with, must ask about (let alone answer questions)? It appears when we do meet again we tend to bring a whole package of judgments, and we cannot but help ourselves. Where is this person 'at,' now? Still, we can hug our friends. (Even though we are not really truly friends at all; just people who know each other.)

Acquaintances of course usually arise out of being around someone in the field. ("I worked with him for 20 years and didn't know he played the piano," one might overhear). We are like that. We like people, even love them, but know little about them. Some we even know 'socially'. Some we've spent time with, shared dinners with, yet still there remains an essential disconnect. The details of the other's life do not register. We do not recall their birthdays. We do not regularly sympathize with their aches and pains and heartaches and accomplishments and newborn. We do not know the daily dictum of their lives. Friendship is there, yes, but...

Facebook is the favoured connector. Many a relationship is started (and forgotten) thanks to it. Thanks to it, I've personally picked up with some old friends and acquaintances from decades past. And at the same time, I've been able to see the posts of people I once knew. 'Creeping', my students call it. "I creeped you," they'd say, (as if reading something that another had posted as public in the first place is the wrong thing to do). Yet the comments and pictures of my old students growing older by the months and years are indeed interesting. Still, there is no contact between us. I have no need to tell them about me. They do not inquire. Nor do I reach out to ask them how they're doing; I can read it on Facebook.

Thing is, there's a concentric circle around oneself rather like that of a dartboard, with oneself as the bulls eye, yet better thought of in terms of being at the same time a holon, like being at the centre of a tennis ball. The outer limits are where we meet the people we hardly ever get to know; the waitress who serves us; the usher who shows us our seats; the store clerk or the ticket taker. The next layer is those we keep on recognizing, whose names we may even get to know, but who also don't quite know us, or we them. The local storekeeper. The local bank clerk. The doorman. Our fellow office workers. Then comes the layer where we are yet more intimate with people. And so on. The degrees to which we allow someone 'in' is the issue. And sometimes, like magic, someone just 'gets' us, and we they, and instantly we know we will always be friends. Always.

As the decades pass we find ourselves getting smaller and smaller with the persons we allow inside. It takes too much energy to blabber on about oneself. (And it takes too much energy to attend to the blabbering of yet another.) We just accept, love, care, and share with the other in a natural flow of accord. Kismet. Or we lose the threads, bit by bit, and that which was a connector at one time no longer serves. A pity, but there you have it. The relationship fizzles, and dies.

Some friends hug. Other merely shake hands. But in the end, feeling is all.

So… How are you, friend?

Love Lessons (the day after Valentine)

Everything relates to the self. Everything. We can only love because of the self. We can only feel, touch, sense, taste, imagine, and be, because of the self. Loving itself begins with ‘I’. It is a verb. It is action. And however subliminal the feeling, however clandestine, however secret, however differentiated, love arises from within the ‘me’. After all, I am loving. Everything relates to me.

 “I love you,” is a powerful pronouncement; and it is as casual as the language we use to say, “I love the view. I love it, that thing, that whatchamacallit, I LOVE it! I love to travel. Thanks for the gift; I love it.”

After all, everything relates to the self.

And the self relates to others. Thing is, the Self tends to see itself more easily in conjunctions, in juxtapositions, in comparisons, in contrapuntal tensions, and in direct opposites rather more readily than in accord and ‘love’. I am me. You are you.

And the difference is...

So we turn the pages of our lives in a series of competitions and comparisons that tend to devalue (or overvalue) that which was for what is Now. And love is tainted or apportioned or pretentious as we struggle to give it relevance within the immediacy of ‘me’. Even a tune to which one cannot relate will disaffect us. So too will words. Big words. Wrong words. So too will another’s physicality. So too will our needs and preferences and moods and intentions and actions create a series of circumstances by which we gauge the quality of our ‘love’.

Everything relates to me!

Everything.

Some persons list and enumerate their achievements. Some have pins all over a map to show others where they’ve been. Some have very many stamps in passports. Some have a closet-full of memory shelves (even though kept private for the privilege of the self.) 

At issue is how much ‘love’ of all one has done, one does, all one is yet to do, sets one free.

After all, isn’t that is what love really is, twixt you and me; a lesson in letting go while still loving you, endlessly.