Another kind of fear

Yesterday I wrote about my fear of having to make a lot of decisions, as one obstacle that stands in the way of my getting published. But there's another.

I am really afraid of putting myself out there.

"I find out what I really want …," 2

Long, long ago—more than fourteen years ago, now that I look at it—I posted a quote from Orson Scott Card's Children of the Mind, where Andrew ("Ender") Wiggin says to Miro:

"I find out what I really want by seeing what I do. That's what we all do, if we're honest about it. We have our feelings, we make our decisions, but in the end we look back on our lives and see how sometimes we ignored our feelings, while most of our decisions were actually rationalizations because we had already decided in our secret hearts before we ever recognized it consciously."

So now I wonder: can I use this insight as an analytical tool? Can I—in fact—find out what I want by seeing what I do, or does it just sound good? I guess the thing is to try.

What could be wrong with metta meditation?

 One of the standard Buddhist meditations—at any rate you find lay practitioners in America using it a lot—is the so-called "metta meditation." It's a meditation you can use to wish for peace and metta (loving-kindness) for every living being in the world, or the Universe. One version goes like this:

May I be filled with loving kindness.

May I be safe from inner and outer danger.

May I be well in body, heart and mind.
May I be at peace and completely happy.

May my loved ones and friends be filled with loving kindness. 
May they be safe from inner and outer danger.
May they be well in body, heart and mind.
May they be at peace and completely happy.

May even the people I have difficulty with be filled with loving kindness.
May they, too, be safe from inner and outer danger.
May they, too, be well in body, heart and mind.
May they, too, be at peace and completely happy.

May all beings everywhere be filled with loving kindness.
May all beings everywhere be safe from inner and outer danger.
May all beings everywhere be well in body, heart and mind.
May all beings everywhere be at peace and completely happy.

Taking good care of fear and anger

Last week in Sangha (a meeting I described here) we studied a selection from Thich Nhat Hanh's posthumous book Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet. ("Posthumous" means in this case that it was edited from his talks and published after his death by Sister True Dedication.) One passage* struck me, and I want to quote it at some length to explain why:

"A yogi, a practitioner, is an artist who knows how to handle their [sic] fear and other kinds of painful feeling or emotion. They do not feel they are a victim because they know there is something they can do.

"You listen to the suffering in you and get in touch with it. Breathe in and out deeply to see, 'Why am I suffering? Where has it come from?' ….

"The meditator breathes in, and says, 'Hello, my fear, my anger, my despair. I will take good care of you.' The moment you recognize the feeling and smile to it with love and care, embracing the fear with mindfulness, it will begin to change."

Then a little later** he comes back to this theme:

"There is a deep connection between suffering and happiness; it's like the connection between the mud and a lotus flower. When you take time to listen to your suffering and look deeply into its true nature, understanding will arise; when understanding arises, compassion is born …. You make good use of the suffering to create something more positive: compassion."

Meeting Beryl

So I have met Son 2's girlfriend. I'll call her Beryl.

Yesterday the two of them (Son 2 and Beryl) undertook the long drive from where they are now living (together) to this neck of the woods, where I, and Son 1, and Wife, and Mother, and Brother + SIL all live within an hour or two of each other. For geographical reasons, my apartment was the first stop. So I cleaned the place (which was a benefit right there) and planned a bunch of food for them. They arrived in the evening: I cooked, we ate, and the conversation flowed freely. This morning I made breakfast. Then they drove off to spend Christmas Eve with Son 1 and Wife. They will be coming back some time tonight, because they left their stuff here and are sleeping here. But we didn't make a plan, and I don't know what to expect. Nor do I know whether they will have eaten dinner by the time they get here … though as it gets later, I assume the odds go up that they will be already well-fed.

Tomorrow we drive, all three of us, to Mother's place. Brother and SIL are already there helping to get things ready, and we'll have a Christmas gathering there.

Milestone Sangha?

We just wrapped up our weekly Sangha Zoom meeting less than an hour ago. (This is the UU Sangha that I attended for years before COVID-19, and which later started reconvening over Zoom.) Marie has joined us for the last couple of sessions. I forget whether I mentioned it, but way back when she and I were first getting back together I talked to her about meditation, and at the time she found a Buddhist sangha in her area that she attended for a while. But then after a while she stopped going—maybe it was because of COVID-19, or maybe it was something else. And she told me she missed it. On the other hand, until very recently she has had a commitment on Tuesday nights, so she hasn't joined our UU Sangha Zoom meetings before now.

There were a couple of times back when the Sangha used to meet in person that Marie happened to be in town visiting me on a night that Sangha met, and so she came along with me. But that was quite a few years ago. Most of the Sangha membership has rolled over since then. (Wow, does that make me one of the old-timers already? Scary thought.)

Anyway, tonight was a milestone in my mind, though I don't know if anyone else thought of it that way or even noticed. Tonight Marie was in the Zoom call, and so was Debbie. So far as I can remember, this is the first time they have ever seen each other or communicated at all in any way except indirectly through me.

And so I wonder: Were they watching each other? Were they sizing each other up? What were they thinking?

Changing a lightbulb

Over the weekend I visited my mother, and on Sunday we went out to a concert at the philharmonic in the big city nearby. I always enjoy visiting my mom, and the concert was delightful. But just at the moment I'm feeling very thoughtful.

Saturday evening I went to turn on some lights in the living room. One lamp wouldn't light up, and I saw right away it was unplugged.

"Why is this lamp unplugged?" 

I forget what she said. It was something about Son 2 visiting during the weekend before, which indeed he had. Whatever she said didn't make a lot of sense, so I was only half paying attention.

I tried plugging it in, but the light still wouldn't illuminate. The socket was controlled by a switch, but I checked the other light plugged into the same socket and it was on; therefore the switch was turned on. 

"I wonder if the bulb is burned out. Do you have any other bulbs?"

Blast from the past: Boyfriend 1 aftermath (B1. part 3)

We never had another day as glorious as that first one. Wife continued to be married to me. (In fact, Boyfriend 1's older brother warned him, "If you love this woman encourage her to stay with her husband. Otherwise you will set up a pattern for her of leaving whenever things get tough.") But from time to time she continued to see Boyfriend 1. Sometimes he would visit us. Sometimes she would visit him. Mostly Wife was shy and embarrassed at letting one of us see her fucking the other one, so she tried hard to devolve the threesome into two twosomes. Ironically, this was the wrong choice on her part. What I found, speaking purely for myself, was this: 

If there was a closed door—or thirty miles of freeway—between me and some place that Wife was having sex, I felt insanely jealous. But if she was having sex with someone else right there directly in front of me, I felt fine because I figured that it would be my turn in a few minutes.

I don't know if anyone else in the world feels this way, but I bet they do. I assume I'm not so unusual as all that. But this means that, ironically, Wife's shyness and embarrassment led to maximal levels of jealousy on my part … and probably on his as well.

Blast from the past: Boyfriend 1 visits us (B1, part 2)

I told the beginning of this story yesterday, in this post here. (And, to some extent, in this post from two-and-a-half or almost-three years ago.)

So Wife and I left graduate school, and moved home. We found an apartment. Wife found a well-paying legal secretarial job, got fired, found a second legal secretarial job, got fired, and finally in November found a teaching job that she kept for the next three school years. Somewhere in those first few months I found a job as well. (It was after she found her first job, but before she got the teaching job.)

Boyfriend 1 lived in the same state, but some considerable distance away. Wife had gone to visit him for a weekend earlier in the summer, before I moved back with our stuff and before she had secured an apartment for us. (She was living with my parents at the time, and my father was pretty sure she was fucking someone else. Wife was never nearly as good at secrecy as she prided herself on.) After we were settled … I forget. Did she spend a weekend with him? Possibly not … her job situation kept her pretty well occupied for a while, and not in the fun sense.

But sometime in those first few months, Boyfriend 1 finally made the trip to visit us.

Blast from the past: Wife meets Boyfriend 1 (B1, part 1)

Many years ago, when I first started this blog, I figured I would write a post sooner or later about Wife's involvement with Boyfriend 1. Someday.

Well, it's been fifteen years since I started the blog, and I haven't written it yet. How about if I start writing it tonight? I may not finish it all at once, but maybe it will take me less than another fifteen years to finish.

One other thing: the events in this story mostly happened 36 years ago. That's more than half my lifetime. It is inevitable that my memory will be a little foggy around the details. And if you ever hear the story from anyone else, it might sound different. This is what has stuck with me.

So … 36 years ago last summer, Wife and I had been married for two years, and had been in graduate school for two years. We had problems adjusting to married life. Each of us had unstated expectations that conflicted with the other's unstated expectations, and we weren't good at talking about these things. We were also really bad at communicating about sex, and the pressures of graduate school didn't give us a lot of space or freedom in which to get better at it. (One of our neighbors summarized the graduate school experience all too well by joking, "It's Saturday morning—time for sex!")

"You knew what I was ...."

I've spent the day mulling and fretting over what I saw when I visited Son 1 and Wife yesterday, and what I heard from Son 2 afterwards. I'm sad that Son 1 is so unhappy now that Wife is living with him. At the same time, I'm kind of amazed by Wife.

In other news ....

In other news, it's been two days since I've heard anything from Marie. Right now I think we're kind of pissed off with each other, although I haven't had a lot of time to think about it the last day or so, for obvious reasons. I think it started last week when we were talking and it came out that I wasn't up to date on COVID vaccinations, nor had I gotten this year's flu shot. My opinion on either of these isn't exactly doctrinaire, but I'm unconvinced of the need for COVID boosters (as I explained recently) and hadn't gotten around to getting a flu shot. 

A couple days later, Marie sent me an email ordering me to get both sets of shots, or else give her a damned good reason why not. When I was silent for a couple days more, she followed up with a letter apologizing for calling me "stupid" but reiterating how desperately important these shots are. I answered saying that it's very hard to accept direct orders from a partner while retaining any self-respect, or indeed to reply with anything other than "Go fuck yourself." And she said simply, "Thank you for clarifying how this disagreement looks to you."

We haven't said anything to each other since. At this point I assume we'll talk on Monday evening as usual, and work it out there. I have some thoughts about what might be behind the whole situation, but whenever I try to read other people's minds I'm usually wrong. So maybe I'd better just wait and see. 

Progress of a kind

The last 24 hours have been … really informative. And they've meant a kind of progress in my relationship with Wife and Son 2 … and maybe even Son 1, though that's harder to tell. But explaining it is going to require backing up for a minute. 

Chapter One: Background

This weekend, Son 2 is breezing through town. A while ago I told you about his opportunity to go to graduate school. Since then he applied and was accepted for January admission. Now that it is December he gave notice at his work and his last day was Friday. This weekend he is moving to the city where his graduate studies will take place, and where his girlfriend has been living for a while. He is taking the long way around to get there, visiting first me and then Wife en route, for a couple of reasons: partly winter weather is forecasted to block the more direct route, and partly there are things in my storage unit and in hers that he wants to take to set up his new housekeeping with. He slept in my apartment last night, and he left early this morning for Wife's place. After that I think he'll wind up with a brief visit to my mother before driving to the new city.

Xanthippe

There is a wonderful passage in Xenophon's Symposium, where someone challenges Socrates to ask him why he ever married Xanthippe. If you're not familiar with the background, Xanthippe has gone down in history as the world's most famous shrew, a nagging harridan second to none. And Socrates, the prototype of all philosophers, was her husband.

You could make a joke here about philosophers being unworldly and ineffectual, but that's not what Xenophon does. Rather, he has someone challenge Socrates: You claim to be able to teach people to be better through philosophy—you claim that philosophy is practical in this way—so what's about your wife? Why is she so awful, if you are allegedly so wise?

And Socrates has an answer. Here is the passage:

“If that is your view, Socrates,” asked Antisthenes, “how does it come that you don't practise what you preach by yourself educating Xanthippe, but live with a wife who is the hardest to get along with of all the women there are—yes, or all that ever were, I suspect, or ever will be?”

“Because,” he replied, “I observe that men who wish to become expert horsemen do not get the most docile horses but rather those that are high-mettled, believing that if they can manage this kind, they will easily handle any other. My course is similar. Mankind at large is what I wish to deal and associate with; and so I have got her, well assured that if I can endure her, I shall have no difficulty in my relations with all the rest of human kind.”

These words, in the judgment of the guests, did not go wide of the mark. 

I wish I could pretend that my own motives in marrying Wife were so far-sighted and so lofty. They weren't. But in retrospect I find it reassuring that even Socrates (maybe I should say especially Socrates!) had his own domestic troubles. I surely knew she would be very difficult. I knew I was signing myself up for something that would be life-changing. I didn't know more than that. 

But ... you know ... these things work out.

    

The hardest school: a fantasy

For many years, I had a fantasy.

It all started because I used to be a really good student, back when I was in school. (Yeah, I know: people who brag about their student achievements forty years later are pathetic. Well I'm probably still pathetic, but I'm not bragging. Just explaining.)

Anyway, for years I fantasized about enrolling in a school that was really hard—so hard that even if I tried my absolute damnedest, I could only barely scrape by with a C-.

The point of the fantasy was what happened next. It was one of those montage scenes you see in movies, where the underdog is preparing for the Big Event, and we're shown in a matter of minutes a grueling training regimen that must span weeks or months. And I meant it as a challenge to myself, or perhaps a question: Could I do it? Could I enroll in a school where my natural gifts left me in the middle of the pack (or lower!), and then by grit and determination fight my way to the top? Could I survive even such a school as this fantasy academy, and still graduate summa cum laude? 

Or—the other alternative—were all my celebrated achievements no more than the accidental result of gifts I had done nothing to earn, so that if I had to depend on my own effort and hard work I would fail?

Lilith

By John Collier - Own work, Public Domain,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=207924

Can you handle one more? Here is another of Marie's early poems. Unlike the last two (here and here) it doesn't really advance the story any. But I like the image; and the more I think about it, the more I like it. Doubtless this just means I'm a lecherous old coot, but—what the hell? I'll take it.     

Lilith

Actually, it was I

who ate the fruit;

Eve’s sin

was in watching

and wanting to.

And it’s true

I steal children

But only girls;

And I don’t eat them

in the sense

that is supposed.

Roads not taken

Gosh, while I'm posting old poems from Marie (like this one), here's one she wrote during our first vacation together, back in the summer of 2016. (That was the vacation that I describe here.) She wrote it there, but she was too shy to show it to me at the time; so she emailed it to me after we had both returned to our respective homes.

The story behind the poem is that she had been lamenting that things turned out the way they did for us, in the sense that our first attempts at romance failed so badly. Also, neither of us did anything academic after our promising undergraduate careers, and wasn't that a waste? (Marie and I were both selected for ΦΒΚ, for example. So was Wife, for that matter. Sheesh!) I replied that nothing is pre-ordained, and that while maybe things might have gone better than they did, they also could have gone a hell of a lot worse. Here and there, over time, I discussed some of the options that we might have taken, and didn't. On the plus side, there was always the fantasy that we might have married and wound up both teaching at the same school somewhere. On the other hand, we each contemplated suicide when we were young, because we each (independently) felt trapped by our lives and despaired of anything ever getting better. So there were always lots of possibilities, and our job is to make the best of whatever we've landed ourselves in.

She mulled this, and then turned it into a poem, as follows.

In the same vein, please note also another poem that she wrote here: Hosea's Blog: It never happened (hoseasblog.blogspot.com).  

Back-story on Marie, year 1½

I posted the basics of this story back in late 2015, or thereabouts: see here, here, and here. But there is always more to tell in any story, isn't there? Recently Marie was looking through some of her old poems from back when we were in school together, and she found one she had written then but never showed me. It was about how she perceived all the failed, abortive conversations we had, where she would try to talk about how she was feeling, and looked for me to acknowledge her in some way ... and meanwhile I was strangling on my own inability to discuss anything emotional. (I've talked about some of that difficulty here, and here, and here.)

Anyway, when she sent me this I was struck by how well, how accurately, and with what economy and precision it summed up so many months of our conversations. Also, I think she meant the last line to sound despairing; but looking back from forty years later, I am struck by how prescient she was ... and in a good way!