Category Archives: Gratitude

The prison of our minds

There’s a famous story I’m thinking of, as I can’t find my way out of the loop of my two closest friends suddenly and irrevocably withdrawing their friendship from me.   The final communication was now almost four months ago, and it was just my old friend confirming that he would not be honest in trying to resolve our senseless conflict.  I have no illusion about anything involving that long running shitshow, understanding fully now how deadly any conflict is with this inexorable personality type. 

Yet, almost every day, as similar things are played out constantly in mainstreamed extremist politics — projection, incoherence, lies, vilification — I am reminded of my painful struggle to prevent the fatal falling out with my two old friends. They shocked me by continually using every familiar MAGA technique to blame and silence me.

Two monks who haven’t seen each other in many years meet in the forest.  They greet each other and one asks the other “do you still think about those sadists who held us captive and tortured us?”

“No,” says the monk “how about you?”

“I think of them every day and I never think about them without wishing karma to descend on them so that they hurt the way we did when they tortured us” says the other monk.

“Then you are still their prisoner,” says the more enlightened monk.  

True enough.

The thought that consoles me, as I am still the prisoner of thoughts of the brutal unfairness of the mistreatment I experienced at the hands of people who claimed to love me, is that I have no ability, at the moment, to blow off much  steam, to get things out of my system physically.  Strenuous exercise is always good for relieving much of that kind of tension.  In recent years I’d go for long, fast paced walks to clear my head, now I can only walk a block at a time, painfully, before I have to sit and rest.  Try clearing your head with that kind of halting walk. 

So the pain in my ailing knees reminds me to go easy on myself for not being able to break fully out of the prison I can’t think my way out of at the moment.  Mercy is a great gift to give yourself. When I am back in shape, after my knee replacement and rehab, I intend to flush the rest of this ugliness out of my system, daily.

When the truth bites you in the ass

Sometimes you can’t avoid a truth you would rather not confront. Without looking squarely at the actual situation, and understanding how it works, no solution will ever be possible. So if you are tormented in a relationship you will need to find a way to grasp the dynamic, and assess the damage being done, before you can end the torment.

A parent’s overwhelming need to feel in control and infallible, constantly undermining your own needs is a brutal thing to look at directly. It is natural to make accommodations, learn to accept blame for things you didn’t actually do, flatter the parent when necessary, learn when to withdraw, swallow a response, put on a false smile. These do not really solve anything, but they keep the ongoing harm to a minimum since you avoid fresh conflict with them.

The next step, the painful but freeing one, is understanding that this parent is not capable of behaving any better. They are stuck in unresolved pain from their own earlier life. They may not know how to resolve conflicts peacefully. You may tell everyone that your mother is a goddess, and she may smile, and bask in your admiration, but if you explain that you were calling your mother a goddess only to avoid her rage, she will make you pay for your unappreciated candor.

There are truths we resist because they undermine things we value greatly. At the same time, there is no healthy alternative when you understand the mistreatment you’ve been forced to tolerate. Someone who forces you to tolerate the intolerable does not love you very well.

“What is hateful to you do not do unto another” is an excellent and practicable formulation of the Golden Rule. We all know what we hate, we probably know it better than almost anything. So if I am doing something to you that I hate done to me, you will, and should, point this out to me. If my answer is “yeah, you hate it, maybe even I hate it, but fuck you, this is all you deserve and all you’ll ever get from me” you should very much take me at my word.

Every day that you don’t take me at my word, and hope that somehow love will prevail, is a day that the unacknowledged truth (that my final word to you is fuck your fucking feelings, asshole) is taking another giant bite out of your ass. In the end you’ll have no ass left, a very bad way to live.

beautiful comment

I was listening to the original Walter Huston recording of Kurt Weill’s haunting and beautiful September Song (lyrics by Maxwell Anderson), a melody he wrote for Huston’s limited vocal range. Houston’s version is indeed a beauty. So was this comment below the YouTube video, from seven years back.

Why I write everyday

The world doesn’t care very much about any one of us. In fact, it doesn’t care at all. We are fortunate if we have people who love us and treat us with kindness, but as for the world itself, it doesn’t give a rat’s ass about any one of us. It has seen billions and billions of us come and go, often dying violently for no real reason, except that somebody else is angry and takes it out on us in a lethal fashion. The universe itself is clearly indifferent to any individual’s existence.

Hey, that’s a nice Merry Christmas Eve, fella!

That’s not the point, that’s the background. In a universe that is indifferent we have a need to connect ourselves to others who care. And so in this age of the internet, with the illusion of connection to everybody else alive and staring at their phones, we send out our beacon to find others who might have suffered the same things we have, who might care, who might benefit from our thoughts and feelings if we can set them out clearly.

At this moment in history when American deaths of despair have reached these terrible proportions, when millions of isolated people have literally given up on the idea of love, kindness, companionship, decency and fair treatment, voices of calm, voices of reassurance, are so important.

When I write, I feel a connection to people I have never met. It is in part an illusion, since few people ever read these words, but the connection is also real. These posts take on a kind of life, they can be read anytime, they can be found when you might need to find something like them and derive some sense of comfort from knowing that somebody else has gone through things very similar to what you have gone through.

It may comfort you to know that you are not the only person who spent childhood in a senseless war zone, trying to make peace with an insanely implacable foe, and although you are wounded and scarred by this kind of upbringing, it doesn’t have to destroy you.

It may comfort you to know that if you love doing something very much, writing for example, if you do it every day you will get better and better at it. I don’t know that I have much native musical talent, but after half a century of loving to play music I’m a very good self-taught instrumentalist.

Love really is all you need, it makes the world go round. Lack of love is responsible for every terrible mistake that humans make, certainly every act of violence. Loving what you do is a net good. Spend some time everyday doing what you love, you will not regret it.

Thanksgiving and waking up from a bad dream

We all have many things to be grateful for on Thanksgiving, even if the Thanksgiving story we tell our children is probably mostly bullshit.  Yes, local Native Americans may have shown up with gifts and taught the Pilgrims how to survive the winter in the New World (which was to the natives just the world).   Yes, there may have been generosity shown toward the extreme religious fanatic Puritan Europeans.  The rest, as they say, is history.  A history that can only make us feel bad (as fact deniers always insist), so let us feel good about the things we, personally, have to be thankful for.

When you wake up from a bad dream and see that you are still there, unharmed, that it was only a dream, it is a great relief.  You can feel the well-being of waking from a nightmare throughout your body.  Like you dodged a bullet.   Damn thing could have killed me!   But it didn’t, thank God, it was only a dream.  You wake up to a better day as you shake off the bad dream.

Sometimes things we love in our lives, relationships that go back many years, curdle, turn poisonous.  You try your best to fix them, maybe try beyond the point of reason sometimes.  When you see you can’t fix it, that your efforts to resolve the conflict are not being reciprocated in any way — it is time to stop trying to fix it.  You can only do your part, when there are others involved.  If you do your part and still face hostility, denial, anger and blame then accept the proof that something that was once easy, and fun, and mutually beneficial, is not that way any longer.   Otherwise there will be hard work, on your end, and then, when you’ve done that hard work, even harder work, and after that, harder work still.   At a certain point you have to admit defeat, you cannot change what cannot be changed.  Wake up and smell the future.

The future smells different, something familiar that you loved very much is gone.  This is a sadly familiar human reality, it happens with every death of a loved one, happens to us all and to those we must leave.  Since change is the only constant in life, do not mourn those painful things you have to let go while everyone is alive, beyond the initial period when you are processing the sadness of a death during life.  It is a tragedy, yes, but no worse than a terrible dream, if you have truly done everything in your power to fix what is unbearably broken.  

If you want a little sweetness to make the bitter medicine go down easier, consider that all real growth is accompanied by pain, or at least great discomfort.   You have passed the point of discomfort into pain, and have continued forward with good will in spite of the cost to youself.  Be consoled by your effort and don’t fault yourself for not doing the miraculous.  You exerted yourself to your limits and that is more than most people do.   Take comfort from that.

Part of gratefulness, I think, is recognizing that it is good to finally see a terrible thing you have been unwilling or unable to see for a long time and accepting it as it actually is.  You sleep better once you make peace with something that seems too horrible to imagine.  Better sleep leads to only good things.  Like more gratefulness.

Friendship?

Worth thinking about, obvious as it also is:

You deserve friends who make you laugh, feel loved, comfort you when you need comforting, accept your limitations and quickly work out any problems with you when they see you are unhappy.   

You deserve friends who always give you the benefit of the doubt, who accept when they’ve hurt you and always do their best to make amends and not let you sit in pain. 

You deserve friends who return your best efforts at kindness and friendship with their own best efforts.   We all deserve that. 

We are lucky when we find real friendship and should remember to be grateful for every day of it.  Friendship should never be taken for granted, it is mortal, just like us.