Noble silence

It’s been another week since I last posted about Debbie’s calling a halt (or at least a stay) to our relationship, and I’m starting to think she might be right.  Maybe not in every detail, but on the right path at any rate.

I didn’t come to this idea right away.  My next theory (after the one I posted last week) was actually pretty unkind: I started thinking that maybe this is par for the course.  I don’t actually know how long her other relationships have lasted; but I’ve gotten the sense that most of them – with the exception of her second marriage, that lasted twenty-something years – weren’t all that long.  Maybe a few months, or a year, or three years … in any event, I was in the process of convincing myself that I wasn’t doing all that badly by making it to the one year mark (or almost, depending on when you start counting).  As I say, it was pretty unkind … but it sure did make things easier on my ego.

And then over the weekend I realized all of a sudden how relaxed I felt that I didn’t have to be planning around someone else.  Wait – what?  Then as I tried to follow that vagrant thought, I began to see the whole picture from another angle.

There are a lot of things that I’ve been meaning to do for some time now, and haven’t done.  Hell, I still have all my books in boxes instead of having unpacked them, and I moved into my apartment more than eight months ago.  What gives?  And what’s with all the other things, maybe more serious ones: like bringing my accounting software up to date, or making a proposal to Wife for how to split our assets, or getting some idea what I want to do with my life now that it’s up to me?  I’ve dragged my feet on all of these; and while there are always “reasons” one of the big ones has been that I’ve been preoccupied with Debbie.  We’ve been doing things together, or going places together, or talking, or writing each other.  Whatever we’ve been doing, my attention has been over there, with her.  Very little of it has been back here, with myself.  Is that where I want my attention?

Well, it’s not what I’ve been telling myself.  My whole story these days is that for the last thirty years I’ve made all my decisions focussed around Wife, and now finally it’s time to explore and see what I want to be when I grow up.  Who am I when she’s not distorting the picture?  Only, … doesn’t that mean that any other intense, intimate relationship will have the same effect?  Won’t it mean just swapping one external center for another?

I think that’s why I felt kind of relieved that I didn’t have to spend the weekend thinking about what to do with Debbie, what to say or write to Debbie, how Debbie would feel about this or that.  I just didn’t.  And I almost didn’t notice that I felt relieved … but there is was, a little wisp of a vagrant thought.  And when I chased it down?  Yup, that was it.

This noticing a subtle, vagrant thought made me see the time in another way.  After all, the whole point of meditation is that with enough quiet you can start to see all the energy the mind spends making up stories for itself … and then you don’t have to be entrapped by the stories because you realize that they aren’t the same thing as reality.  So then if taking a break from each other means I can notice feelings I would otherwise have overlooked, … then this whole interlude is really a kind of meditative exercise.  A kind of meditation.  It’s longer than a normal sitting meditation.  It will last weeks, months, years, … maybe the rest of my life.  But that’s what it is.  It’s a kind of prolonged Noble Silence.

I’m not quite sure that’s what Debbie was trying to say.  But in any event it helps me see a positive side to the experience.  I don’t have to spent my time feeling glumly sorry for myself.  And that has to be a good thing.

Oh, … I tried to distill these thoughts into a couple of haikus that I’ll send her tomorrow.  I figure haikus are a better choice than sonnets, both because they are a lot easier to write and because they are less passionate … more in keeping with the whole idea of silence and reflection.