Detachment

This will be quick. 

There's a story I think I have told you from when I was in third grade: I know I referenced it here, and maybe other places too.  I've told it in the past as symptomatic of my early bouts of depression, or of being a "consummate outsider".  But there's another way to read it as well, one that didn't occur to me before I started to meditate.

It's just to observe that even back then -- even when I was eight years old -- I had already developed the ability to look at myself from the outside, to detach from the emotions that I was feeling at the time and criticize them from a neutral perspective.  It didn't stop me from feeling them, heaven knows!  They surged through me all the same, like waves at high tide.  Especially when I was young and didn't have so many layers of cynical posing calcified over my raw feelings, my emotions could be very intense ... even the ones that I more or less knew I had manufactured for my own entertainment (as I discuss here).

But at the same time that I could feel my emotions for what they were, I knew they weren't the whole story.  I always knew that there was another perspective that would be available to me when the storm had passed and the tide had receded.  The same thing happened when I used to get angry at Wife.  (I'm pretty sure I've described the flavor of my anger more than any of you wants to hear, but right now I can't find a suitable post as an example. Lousy indexing. Let's try here and here just as starters.)  The thing is, my anger would come on all at once, in a rush, and it would sweep me away; but then a few minutes later it would be over and it was truly gone.  I could see clearly again.  Wife never understood this: she remembered the storm and assumed that was the reality, now and forever amen.  So she was afraid a lot more than she needed to be.

Anyway, I wasn't trying to talk about that a lot.  I just thought it was interesting that I had learned to detach and observe myself at such an early age.