Journeys

I have a great big list of things that must be done today. I just don’t feel like doing any of them. I ask myself what will happen if I blow them all off and spend the day staring at the tv and doing nothing. I mean I know the world won’t stop spinning if I don’t call Direct TV and straighten out a billing mistake. I know that not cleaning my daughter’s room today won’t lead to catastrophe. On the other hand if I don’t take care of these hum drum tasks they will just keep piling up and my life will become more unmanageable than it already is. So what to do? Finding motivation is like looking for a needle in a haystack. You know it is there inside you somewhere but have no idea how to turn on the switch. I have heard promising yourself a reward can motivate you to do a task that is unpleasant but strangely I can’t even think of a reward that would get my butt moving. The journey through my life these days is filled with challenges and few rewards, so few that I am not even sure what would be pleasurable to me anymore. I am truly struggling these days to find my inner strength. I am struggling to find hope and faith that taking action will lead to positive results because it has been so long since I have had a positive change as a result of anything I have done. So today I will trudge and drag my feet. I will do what I can. Maybe tomorrow my motivation will surface and I will have what I need to want to do something instead of feeling like have to do everything.

This past couple of days I can’t stop thinking about all the choices I should have made. Or the things I could have done differently. Or the what if I would have done that with the money I had instead of the thing I did. Those thoughts have been followed by why and how did I make such bad decisions. Now I have been recovering from life long enough to know the shoulda, coulda, wouldas followed by the why mes is just self pity but the one thing no self-help guru or spiritual guide has addressed is what about when its not the poor mes but look how the bad choices I made screwed up my kids lives. You see I don’t feel bad for myself, I feel bad for my kids. My bad and often impulsive decisions have left my kids in a lifestyle I never imagined for them. I worry because I don’t have health insurance for them, or college funds or the money to take them places and give them things that their peers seem to have in abundance. As I type that I feel the need to defend the statement, I am not talking about cell phones and plasma screen tvs, nor am I talking about expensive gaming systems or other toys, I am talking about basic things, like shoes and clothes, a home where they can play safely, and time, my time and attention. When I choose to have children I made them promises, promises that I have not kept and I have a great deal of self hatred as a result of not being able to provide for them. Now I know that all around the world there are children who are suffering from problems much bigger than the ones I imagine for my children. I know there are places where the last thing a mother worries about is a college fund, but I do not live in those places, and that is not my experience. In no way am I meaning to take away from the struggle of others but these days I am finding that comparing my situation to those who are in a worse situation is in no way constructive or helpful for me. I was brought up being told not to complain because if all I had was one pair of shoes somewhere, someone had no shoes. That just does not seem to make me feel better. Actually it makes me feel worse. So I have no answers, I only know I am seeking to be free from the emotional pain that comes with wishing to change a past that can not be changed. I know I need to just let it all go and look to what I can do today to make the present more bearable. For now I keep writing about my journey in the hope that someday it will make sense to me, or to someone else. 

What is home? Is it the place you live? The dwelling, the city, the state or is home a state of mind? I find the lyrics of songs to be a kind of spiritual workbook. Lately much of the music that I hear talks of home and it makes me wonder where is home for me. I am not currently living in the state where I grew up. This is not the first time I moved away. When I left in my twenties my home state did not feel like the “home” in songs. It was a place where I felt stifled and trapped. When I returned there a decade later I felt like I had come “home”. Now another decade later I left because things did not work out for me and my nuclear family. We lost our “home” (like so many others have in these recent times) and could not find affordable housing. My husband and I attributed much of our troubles to the place and so we left. We packed our little family and all our possessions and we ran. We thought we were running to a new start, a new future, a new and brighter beginning. Almost a year has passed and I am finding that I just don’t feel at “home”. I find myself missing the people and places we left behind. At the same time I can’t see going back, because other than the people there is nothing there for us. At the same time I don’t feel like there is anything for us where we are now. So I find myself wondering where is home? I think home is a feeling more than a place. So really I believe I am seeking a feeling that I can not define. Maybe that feeling is safety, security, stability. The problem is I know that those 3 things are really an illusion. It makes me wonder if “home” then is just an illusion. If it is just an illusion then it would follow that it can be created anywhere because an illusion is an inner creation. In the end that is my struggle on this journey, my inner world is out of control. Control is probably a misnomer. My inner world seems to be out of my reach. My thoughts and feelings do not seem to be my choice. I have become dependent on my outer circumstances to dictate my inner world and there is no bigger mistake than to let life dictate your thoughts and feelings. Almost no human being has a perfect circumstantial life. Even the mega wealthy face circumstances that are painful and out of their control. So allowing what happens to you and around you to control how you think and feel is always going to lead to a feeling of dis-ease. So the daily anxiety that I feel emotionally and physically comes from the circumstance I am living. These days, I just don’t feel like I have a home and I am craving the feeling of coming home, of being home and of finding home. So my journey is becoming a search for the fictional place called home.

Sometimes feeling physically under the weather is the hardest part of a day. We humans are a blend of our physical, emotional and mental natures. The three are intimately linked. In striving to live life to the fullest and enjoy everyday it takes these three natures to be functioning properly. Its like putting the cart before the horse in some ways, you focus your time and attention on the emotional stuff in your life and you wake up one day to realize you are really tired. I am starting to realize that it is important, just as important to care for my physical well being as it is to continue my journey to understand my emotional and spiritual quest. It can also be overwhelming to take care of yourself when you are tired and feeling beat up by life’s circumstances. In the past I have been overly focused on the physical nature of my life. I caught a great episode of Oprah the other day and she spoke a great deal about balance. I think it is a simple concept to add balance to your life. Of course it is obvious when you see a person who applies this balance thing. I have a wonderful friend who has always seemed to get the balance thing. People who get and apply this concept seem to know how to be “happy”. They seem to know how to “stop and smell the roses”, even if the roses are growing in the middle of a pile of manure. I on the other hand have no idea how to live a balanced life. I am more the type that lives like I am a pinball in a big pinball machine being flung this way and that and doing the best I can to make the best of where ever I may land at any given moment. All of this is really quite paradoxical. You see if you have faith that everything is ok and will always be ok, then you have to let go of trying to always control everything and plan everything. Balance seems to me to take an awful lot of planning and control. These days my life has been about letting go. Letting go of preconceived notions and plans and opening myself to the universes plan for me. Again, I am a little pinball in a pinball machine waiting to see where life flings me next, always hoping for the best, but also bracing myself for the worst. So balance seems to be elusive for me. Actually it seems like a fantasy because my life is filled with must do lists and adding to it seems impossible even if it means adding pleasant things like time to take care of myself with nutritious meals, and exercise. ( I won’t even touch on the financial barriers to nutritious meals here because that is a topic for a political blog, eating healthy is not something easily accessible to the masses in America that’s why obesity runs rampant in poorer communities. Take a look at school menus someday, look at what the under-privileged can afford to eat if they eat at all… like I said, a topic for a political blog) It seems to me today that balance is about sacrificing one thing for another, so if I choose to rest today because I am tired, that means the house does not get cleaned, and the clothes don’t get washed and the dog doesn’t get walked, and dinner doesn’t get made. I know I know some of you will say well that stuff can wait, in a hundred years who will care if your floor didn’t get washed on January 7, 2009. Here is the problem with that theory, sooner or later those things must be tended to, and the longer they get put off the bigger of a task they become, and the more overwhelming they seem and the more tired I feel thinking about doing them, so these days I embrace the school of thought that says don’t put off till tomorrow what you can do today. Problem is there are always a million things that have to be done today, and not one of them involves “being kind to myself” and believe me at the end of the list of must do there is no time for balance. So I love the theory, but in the end I think in practice it just won’t work for me right now. So my journey continues and maybe tomorrow I won’t feel so tired and will be able to do something for me. For now I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, no matter how heavy my feet feel, and working hard to believe that the best is still ahead. 

I awake this morning angry and resentful. I have this uncomfortable tightness in the pit of my stomach. I partly know who I am angry at and why, and partly my reaction is an over reaction. First of all I am always angry at myself when I wake up. I am angry at where I am in my life and the bad choices I made to get me here. Now many people will say “don’t beat yourself up” “you didn’t do anything wrong” “you can’t feel guilty”. Here is the thing I don’t feel guilty. You see my friends and family are confusing my honest assessment of what I did and my anger at myself with guilt. Let me elaborate. If someone told you that there was a speed trap on a certain road that you travel everyday and you went speeding through that area and got a ticket how should you feel? Should you blame the police officer? Should you blame God? Should you curse your bad luck? How about the next day, when you went blasting through that same 35mph zone, this time going 60mph. How should you feel? Should you say “pity me, feel bad for me, nothing ever goes my way, I never catch a break”. How about when on the 3rd day you are pulled over again, and this time the police officer doesn’t give you a ticket but sends you to traffic school to get help for your speeding problem. And how should you feel when after 1 month you have accumulated tens of thousands of dollars in tickets, lost your license, and so on. Well where I am in my life is a place that I landed because I ignored everything I knew and now I am paying the consequences. So I am angry at myself. Very angry. I am infuriated. I made choices that I knew would cost me in the future. I choose to accumulate debt that I could not payoff in a million lifetimes by living beyond my means. The sad part is I have no fancy cars or tvs or jewels. All the debt I accumulated was for a “lifestyle”. Eating in restaurants, shopping at Walmart , nonsense just nonsense, junky stuff that had no value always pinching pennies only to have nothing in the end. It wasn’t the first time I had dug myself a hole by using credit to “live”. It was the third. I crawled out of the hole the first 2 times working 2 and 3 jobs and living like a monk. But this time that wasn’t an option. That is only one example of the bad decisions I made over the last six years that caused me to be living in a difficult situation. As I write this I am angry at myself for still whining and complaining. As I said before really my life is not all that bad. I mean my goodness, I am sitting here at my kitchen table(which came from a garbage heap) typing on a laptop( one of the things I was able to keep from better times) in a fairly safe apartment(although paying the rent month to month is a struggle). I know I will have access to food today, and so will my children. I know my life is better than millions of people today. And I think that is why I am really angry at myself, because I know it in my head but in my heart, my soul, the pit of my stomach it isn’t enough, I want more. Why? Why do I always want more? Is it really me who wants more? Or is it the me that has been programmed by my environment to want more, bigger and better? And if it is the decades of American brainwashing that tells me I can’t be happy with so little how do I undo that message? How do I tune out the entire philosophy of my generation and culture? How do I free myself? Because really in the end I just want to be free from this false desire to have a bunch of stuff. So on today’s journey I will seek better choices, I will seek to be free of predetermined outcomes. I will seek to leave the anger behind, and maybe I can chose not to be angry just for a little while.

Change is not easy. When you are used to worrying about the worst thinking positive is scary. I have read many books on positive thinking and it makes sense that your thoughts control your world more than your circumstances. There is an old cliche that sums it up ” 10% of life is what happens to you, 90% of your life is reaction to it” So controlling your thoughts and reactions must be the secret to having peace and happiness day to day. Lately everything I read says, if you want to be thin, believe you already are, if you want to have money, believe you already have it, if you want to quit smoking, believe you are a non-smoker already ( even if you are having a puff right now). So in these last few days I keep telling myself everything is what I want it to be already. But I worry that nothing will change if I don’t take action, if I don’t have a desire to change it and the reality is not what I am telling myself. So there seems to be a fine line between positive thinking and delusional thinking. I mean if I believe I am rich but don’t have the money to pay the electric bill am I thinking positively or delusionally? If I am 30 pounds overweight and telling myself I am thin am I a positive thinker, or a delusional lunatic? I do believe anything is possible, but I just can’t seem to find the simple faith required to believe that just wanting something to be so will make it so. What really blows my mind is the stories I read about people who claim they just wished things into being by having faith and belief, because I want that to be so…maybe my husband is right, maybe I just over-think everything and that is why all this believe without seeing philosophy is so hard for me to apply. I have a pragmatic nature, an empirical side that needs to know how something works and so I can’t seem to let go and just believe that believing will make all my dreams come true and all my troubles disappear. By the way, in light of all the suffering and misery that fill the world my life is pretty good and I have nothing to complain about, and that makes it even harder to live inside my own head. Because really, I am rich beyond materialism, I am thin( well it depends on how you classify thin I guess), I am healthy( well I can breathe on my own and walk and talk and type) etc… most of all I am blessed with family and I am so great-full for all that I do have, so I will keep working on the gratitude thing and the positive thinking thing, and the search for peace, happiness and fullfilment and maybe just maybe it will all materialize like I have been reading about. There is one thing I know for sure I am not capable of giving up. I know that as long as I breathe I will keep looking for the answers to all these questions.

Each day is really a chance for a fresh start. Somehow New Years Day is more powerful than other days for a fresh start. I have been absent from my blog over the holidays. In some ways I was absent from myself and that made it very hard to write. There is a great country song with a lyric about stepping outside the door and living someone else’s life. In the song the narrator finds everything going right and so he feels like it must be someone else’s life he is living. Over the last few weeks I have felt like I was living someone else’s life not because everything was going right but because I couldn’t recognize any part of my life as my own. Not too long ago I wrote about grief. What I was trying to communicate was the grief of losing a dream, not a person or thing. I believe we all have expectations for ourselves and our lives. Those expectations are directly related to our dreams and visions of our futures. Throughout my life I have had hardship. I have faced many challenges. Whether I was broke, or fat, or lonely, or even drunk the bad times made sense in relationship to my actions and my choices. Bad choices led to unwanted consequences and lots of wreckage to clean up. It made sense. So I grieved the dreams that feel as a result of my own choices. Today I find myself in a place that makes no sense. In the decades leading up to becoming a mom I led a selfish life. When I became pregnant with my first child I made a commitment to change everything about the way I was living. In making that commitment a dream was formed, not necessarily in my conscious mind. I went to college, I graduated at the top of my class, I was offered a dream job before graduation and my life began. It was still a life of challenges. I was still broke, still unhappy with my physical appearance, still driving a junk car etc… but it was my life. I saw a future of my own making. I was confident and dare I say happy? Somehow in the six years from the time I graduated until now …I had to resign from my job, lost my house and moved my family 1500 miles. I can’t find a job in my chosen profession, the situation makes graduate school an option that has to wait, broke is something I would like to be because today I am poor, and yes there is a difference between broke and poor. Grieving the dream has been hard because I never really recognized that I was living the dream. I was so busy all the time trying not to lose anything that I never realized I had everything. Today I still have everything that matters. I have lost nothing that is really important. There is one thing missing, I don’t have a dream. It seems I have lost the ability to dream. I had to work so hard to accept where I am, to say even without a job, or health insurance or a home I am ok, that I am afraid to dream again. So it seems that today I have found myself in a nether world. So I have told myself, self… you need a fresh start. I can think of no better day than the first day of 2009 to grant myself permission to dream again. So today I am dreaming of being a non-smoker, again. I am going to dream that dream until it comes true. When it does then I will work on dreaming another dream. One day at a time, one dream at a time maybe I will find my life again. Happy New Year and may you dream a dream today!

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. A basic theory you learn in physics. You learn this theory as early as middle school. Really you know it before then, instinctively. To know hot you must know cold. To know sweet you must know sour. All things in life are relative. So simple really. In searching to escape from depression it seems natural to seek its opposite, happiness. But I have found over the years happiness is impossible to find. It is not in one place, or one person, or one thing. It is a culmination that occurs as a result of a mysterious moment. So I don’t seek happiness anymore. At this point on my journey I am more interested in find peace and balance. Freedom from unhappiness is really what I am looking for these days. The meditations I have been reading and receiving from friends through email these days are all about positive thinking. Believe it and it shall happen. Think it into being. You get the idea. Here is my conflict. This one book I was reading talks about each of us being God. Not a new idea, I’ve read it before in many religious texts. Each school of thought or religion phrases it differently, but as far back as the Greeks it was philosophized that we were all part of a greater whole, or God. So this book I was reading and a bunch of others say as “God” you deserve everything you truly desire. You are special. You are deserving, love yourself, blah, blah, blah. Like I said I have read this kind of  stuff in a million places. It can get a little annoying at times. The problem is this, if it is written in a million places, by people from all different faiths, across all times and all places then maybe just maybe there is some truth in it. I mean think of it like this, these people can’t even agree on what color the sky is, but they all seem to believe in this one simple core idea? The core idea is prayer, faith and belief .The idea is that you deserve to be “happy” because you are a child of God. And the cure? All you have to do is believe and be positive. Be sure that you deserve to be happy and you will be. In the end every self help book, every twelve step group, every shrink, every religious leader they are all selling the same thing, believe it and it will be so. I hate to say it but it seems to be that way. So if it is that easy why aren’t we all walking around ecstatically happy?Inner demons from the past thats why. Everything that I was taught all my life was that I was not worthy. I was not deserving and those tapes are so ingrained in my consciousness I am not sure they can ever be erased. 

Everyday brings a chance to start again. Every start is a chance to achieve your dreams.

Sometimes you have to get things off your chest. You just need to put your worries, fears and angers out there in the world to get them out of your mind. But as healthy as venting can be it can also lead to more difficulties. It seems that as unique as human beings are we also have the same drives and behaviors. Over the last year or so I have tried this venting thing with dire consequences. It seemed that when all I wanted was someone to listen the people I talked with wanted to tell me how to fix things. When I didn’t take their advice they became hurt and angry. Both new relationships and old were damaged, beyond repair in some cases. So what is one to do when you need to talk but become afraid of sharing what you are thinking and feeling? One thing I realized is you have to pick and choose who you unload to carefully. Another is to write. That is one thing this blog is doing for me. It is giving me someplace to unravel the mystery of my days and nights, my past, present and future. I feared posting these things at first and still am reserved in my writings. For many years I kept journals and there is a healing quality to venting through writing. These days are filled with endless chores and tasks that seem to make journaling a task I just don’t find time for anymore. Or perhaps I don’t have the desire. But sometimes you have to take a chance and share your thoughts with another human being. I did that yesterday and although nothing has changed circumstantially I felt better today, lighter in spirit, a little less troubled. I don’t know if the outcome was positive for the man I shared with, my husband, because he often takes my troubles personally and then becomes moody and resentful as if I am placing the blame for my troubles on him. That is one of the difficulties with venting referred to previously. I know there are other resources available for venting, a clergy member, a therapist( if you have health coverage), a twelve step program, but I have not been able to motivate myself to access the resources available. This is when I wonder is there a part of me playing the martyr. Am I wallowing in this pain? Or am I just not able to see how to heal yet? I am trying one day at a time to put one foot in front of the other and I guess sooner or later I will move through these circumstances and on to others. I am hoping that I will grow in this process to a place where something changes and I do not need to purge all of this negativity and confusion. I was reading recently and came across a suggestion that when your mind and heart are full of negativity that is what you draw near to you, and of course the opposite truth, that when you fill your mind and heart with positive thoughts then that is what will manifest in your life. So over the course of my journey I am trying to be honest with myself, own my feelings, but at the same time trying not to be filled with gloom and doom so as not to draw gloom and doom my way. A tall order but today I succeeded in a small way, I let the pain float through me, I acknowledged it but did not let it linger and fester. Maybe if I do that again tomorrow…I guess I will just have to wait and see.