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I had the wildest idea a few days ago. You know I've always felt that I don't really find a lot of meaning in my career, though it pays the bills. You know I haven't known what to do instead. You know I want to travel, and it would be nice if I could see that I was doing some good.
So a few days ago I suddenly had the idea ... maybe after the boys are out of college and my financial obligations are over with, I might quit my job and join the Peace Corps. I checked their website, and there is no upper age limit for volunteers, so long as you can pass a medical exam.
I'd never considered it before, but now I find myself mulling it over and over.
So it looks like I'll be seeing Debbie again in a few weeks. Not in a romantic way, not in a sexual way ... but it also means that "Goodbye" may not turn out to really have meant "Goodbye".
Next month, the UU Sangha that I attend ... the one that Debbie founded ... will be celebrating its tenth anniversary as a group. Debbie is planning to come to town for the event. So a while ago she e-mailed me to check if this is going to be OK for me, having her show up like that. Am I at peace with where we've ended up?
Yes, sure. I'm at peace with it.
She said she is too, though she added that "I won't be surprised if I
experience strong feelings when I see you."
Interestingly, I don't expect to. I had the strong feelings right enough, back when she broke up with me. But I don't feel them now. I'm grateful to be on my own, and I don't want another romance. So while I still love Debbie -- at some level I will always love her -- I think it will be a much calmer, cooler love than it was eighteen months ago.
In some ways ... OK, in many ways ... it's good that we ended it when and how we did. There were indeed little seeds in the relationship that would have spoiled it if they had ripened, but we didn't let them ripen. It is so much better this way than it was with Wife or with D; because with both of them, the connection didn't end until I was righteously sick of them. I wanted nothing more to do with either. And so it's been tough dealing with Wife as we work through all the stuff we have to disentangle; while with D it's been easy because I've had nearly no contact with her at all.
With Debbie, because we broke it off so soon, I am relaxed and at ease. I can still love her in a way, at some level, and it's not a problem.
Makes me pretty sure it would be a bad idea to fall in love with somebody else, though. I wonder how long this will last? Am I going to want to stay single from here on out, until I die? I don't know ....
Another post based on a note from a couple of weeks ago ....
I'm trying to understand what hunger is all about? OK, that sounds crazy or pretentious, so let me explain what I mean.
A couple weeks ago I had to get some blood drawn for my routine physical, and that meant a 12-hour fast the night before. I did it, and found that it wasn't terribly arduous. So then I thought ... well hey, maybe I can do this more often. If I skip one meal a day -- dinner, for instance -- then maybe I'll stop steadily getting fatter the way I've been doing lately. The next night I tried that and succeeded, more or less fine. But I couldn't sustain it longer than that. The next night I had to have something to eat in the evening.
What is so interesting to me is that I didn't exactly feel hungry, not in the sense of my stomach feeling empty or hurting or growling. Nothing like that at all. As far as physical discomfort was concerned, I could have skipped dinner all week long. It's just that I felt ... strange. I don't know how else to put it. Something felt wrong about not sitting down to some food in the evening.
I still don't really understand why.
This is based on a note to myself from a couple of weeks ago. I was at the UU Sangha I attend, and the Dharma lesson for the evening included an exercise: first, cultivate a generalized feeling of loving-kindness in yourself; then, picture the face of someone you have trouble with and try to feel the same loving-kindness towards him or her.
One of the other members said that while she was able to call up a generalized sense of loving-kindness, as soon as she pictured the face of That Person she could feel herself constricting and closing in. What's more, she went on, she could feel a sense of active resistance or even hostility emanating from That Person towards her. I agreed with her that it was very easy for me to feel the exact same thing, but then asked a question: Isn't it interesting that you -- or I, or anybody -- can feel active resistance from That Person when in reality That Person isn't even there? He's just a picture in our minds, that we deliberately imagined for the sake of the exercise!
What does this mean? Clearly what it has to mean is that any resistance we are feeling from That Person is something we are imagining along with imagining his face. It's all in our heads. And that idea, naturally, raises the question: how much of the resistance or negativity that we feel from someone else in real life is also just all in our heads?
I don't have a clear answer.
__________
For whatever it is worth, I find I still have a lot of arguments in my head the way I used to; only now they are no longer arguments with Wife, but with my father. Maybe there aren't quite as many, actually.
All of the recent posts -- everything from October 2 to this one -- were written in rapid succession the evening of Wednesday the 8th. I was meaning to post them earlier, but just didn't get to it. Or something like that.
I'm typing this in a hotel room in Faraway City ... yeah, I didn't think I'd get back here for a while either. It's been a long time. Strictly speaking I'm in a different suburb from before, but it's the same basic place. I'm here nearly all week -- Tuesday through Friday. Then I'm back home for a week, and then I've got a trip to Sticksville. And I've just been asked to visit several other sites before the end of the year, though I haven't figured out if I can fit all that into my calendar yet. Oh, did I mention that a couple of weeks ago our division cancelled all travel for the rest of the year, as a cost-savings measure, unless you can get the approval of the regional president? Maybe I forgot that part. But somehow that's not how it's working out for me.
Meanwhile I've written a couple other long pieces, but haven't posted them here. One was a lengthy description of the Durmstrang Parents' Weekend, which I had promised to write for Wife. You're probably not interested in hearing that. Another ... well, while I was at Durmstrang I talked to Son 2's English teacher. She had asked the students to write essays about their heritage. Apparently his first draft was a bit lackluster, but she was really impressed by his final draft. He skipped past all the usual meanings of the word heritage and wrote instead about how his past has made him who he is: that is to say, he wrote about how he has known his whole life that his mother has a disease which is going to kill her one day, and which left her sick and unable to do things with him for most of his childhood. He went on to explain that this knowledge had the consequence of making him way more compassionate than he would have been otherwise, but also a lot angrier. And then he talked about ways he has learned to deal with the anger. (He goes out into Nature and lets its immensity -- and his comparative insignificance -- restore his calm and sense of perspective. I think in fact he has discovered a form of meditation, even though he always teases me about "sitting and doing nothing" whenever I meditate.)
I asked Son 2 if I could read this paper. I hope I wasn't too pushy, because I know I would hate to show something like that about me to my father! But he did e-mail me a copy. So last night I wrote him a reply, and that too took me a while because I wanted to be brief and not fulsome, but also to do it justice. What I tried to say, in the shortest possible way, was:
- Yes, you are amazingly compassionate. You say nobody sees it, but I see it.
- I totally get everything you say about how to deal with anger.
- The description you give of yourself is both true and admirable.
- Most sixteen-year-olds don't see themselves nearly so clearly. I know I didn't.
I hope I hit the right note. I really do.
It's late. I need to turn in. I don't feel tired yet, but I'll regret it tomorrow if I don't.
They sent her home on Sunday, October 5. She sent me a lot of long texts that day, ... saying that the pathology reports showed conclusively there is no cancer (but didn't say what the cause was instead), that all her friends and church had been just wonderful for her, that she was grateful for everything. A changed woman. In other words, a lot of her bitchiness was probably just fear.
She added that she was (at that point) too weak to go home, so she was going to stay with Alvin for a day or so until she got better.
Later on, Wife texted me that she had been moved to a new room:
Wife: I'm now in room 3273. I was a bad girl and voiced that the staff should do what they say they will. Also, my Mexican roommate got mad because I said "damn". Since I don't know what she said to the 35 Mexican friends who visited her, I don't much mind moving. She speaks perfectly fine English.
And I just thought something like "I see you're back to your shining, Dale-Carnegie self ...."
