The Long Week
I get so tired sometimes that I just want to step in front of a bus. I try so hard to pull my life together, be positive, move ahead and thrive and everybody around me seems to be trying to pull me back down to that place of constant struggle, pain, despair and hopelessness. And then I really feel that way myself.
Life is just so hard and painful and shitty. Why do I keep trying to make it anything else?
Then I get impatient. I hear new age philosophers droning on and on about how we create our own reality, how we are the only ones to blame for any unhappiness in our lives… how we have the responsibility to f’n evolve the species…
Holy smokes: no pressure there huh?
First of all, life does not happen in a vacuum. The idea that we create our own reality is only valid in so far as our choices reflect the current state of affairs in out lives. For example, if I were to go ahead and, say, get liposuction with my divorce settlement (which I have considered as my genes are asserting themselves way too much for my liking) instead of, say, spending my divorce settlement on a law education… or a down payment on a mortgage, well life would be different in each scenario.
Even the latter two choices there, clearly both good choices would send my life on to two very different trajectories. And the liposuction? Well- I guess I can’t even seriously go there *sigh*
So there you have it- the extent to which we create our own reality… significant mind you, but not “otherworldly”
And I will concede, that we do tend to attract a certain kind of person with our own personality…. Sometimes… maybe. For example my roommate tells me as we commiserate about the sad shortage men out there, she tells me… strong women attract weak men. True? I don’t know. God knows, maybe. Maybe.
But the bottom line is that we have zero control over other people… zero control over whether or not our landlord decides to sell the house we are living in- zero control over whether or not someone we love has bipolar disorder and is doomed to a life of intense pain and suffering … no control over the decision a lover makes to leave us… or stay with us…. no control over whether or not we just happen to be standing in the line of fire when a liquor store is robbed and end up in a wheel chair….
Sure… in a few of the afore mentioned examples a person could assert themselves… say their piece, maybe even try to force a measure of control over the other person involved… but inevitably we have to let go.
What we do with that determines where we are and who we are. It is my opinion that a belief system that blames the believer for the suffering around them is counter productive to a well lived and healthy life.
This new age way of thinking that we can control the levels of pain in our lives… or who is in our lives… or the path of a bullet in relation to where we are standing … or that we are responsible for the trajectory of evolution… ouch… could there possibly be any more weight to carry? It’s regurgitated Christian victim blaming. God punishes you because you have too little faith, or too much ego take your f’n pick.
Good grief. When will we learn our relative place in the universe? How can it not be enough to look up at the winter sky and observe the vast galaxy, the unending universe of uncountable galaxies and not know that we are dust?
And there is such beautiful peace in that.
I know that that I stand on one of those swirling sparkling heavenly bodies and that I am as much a part of the universe as any of those heavenly infernos whose light pierces through the frozen, dark expanse. And just like them, someday my flame will die.
But I am here, now. And I burn.
When I think about this I don’t feel hopeless anymore. And I can deal with the despair. And I can muster compassion for the people around me who sabotage their own lives and appear to want to pull me down with them…
But only when I have the humility to recognize my own limitations and stop trying to control the world, stop assuming responsibility for the pain around me and stop trying to fix everything for everyone who is close to me and in pain (and they are all in pain) and just focus on things like: liposuction or law school….
Then it’s a no-brainer.
Then I thrive and I can hear the children laughing again.

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