Happiness is not a problem to solve

That’s why I’m not writing.  Things are good — lovely, even playful.  This is what happiness feels like.  I write, here at least, to solve problems.  No problem is pressing on me right now.

I still don’t know what happened this weekend, or whether we past something or on a plateau between eruptions (they aren’t mutually exclusive.  We could erupt over something else.  It would be so nice to be past this particular thing, though).

I do appreciate having energy for other things.  I’m starting to feel more urges to create, whether or not there is an audience.  A friend makes videos and big art pieces, just for his own engagement and amusement.  I used to wonder why he did that.  Why would you make if no one could see it (and, by implication, praise it)?  Now I’m open the impulse to create for its own sake, and that feels good.  Or, rather, when I’m getting a lot of sleep I have the impulse to create for its own sake.  I’m thinking of a private photo essay: “I woke up like this,” which would be pictures of myself, without make up, taken on the same day each month.  I am aging, and I want to see it happen.  Will I look noticeably older December 15 than I did January 15? When will the change register? Or will so much depend (as the poet says) on sleep, alcohol, mood, lighting, so that the changes appear and disappear until one day they settle in completely?  And that would be only for me, just because I’m curious.

I was not curious for so long. Or limitedly curious, or fearful of being curious.  It’s the flip side of creativity, and I’m glad to have it now.

Outside In

Here’s what people told me in the course of my work day today: “I love your idea… There’s really something there.”  “If [project X] goes well, that’s the kind of thing you could put on your tombstone. You have the chance to totally change the world of [X] with this work.”  “You should tell the prospective funder [of project Y] that there is a tremendous opportunity to add value here.  There is no doubt you will succeed.” “Can I be included in this project?” “If you are are just saying this kind of thing off the top of your head, you are one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever talked to.” (This is not a typical day.)

The last time I blogged about what someone told me at work, the words were “your book is toxic” “people think you are entitled” “stop talking about….”

Why am I saying this?  Because on Tuesday, between the penultimate and ultimate paragraphs of my post, Daniel and I had a quarrel — one of our usual themes, but absolutely the most awful of those usual themes. I responded in my usual way.  At the end, we were both sad, exhausted, unhappy, bitter.  Me, especially.  I saw that I was doing the old thing, and the old thing doesn’t serve.

I didn’t work between Dec 23 and Jan 5th.  Daniel, Milo and I visited my parents till Dec 31, and then I was home sick and in bed through Jan 4th.  When we were visiting my parents, I felt myself becoming more like my old self, inhabiting the person who was less supported (my parents were very supportive… yet not really supportive in the ways I needed support… it’s complicated, as these things always are. They had limits that I exceeded, and everyone had the very best intentions, massive amounts of love for each other.  There was simply a failure of imagination on their part, and no one is to blame.)

Anyway, the environment changed me, or called out certain personality characteristics that I’ve pole-vaulted over in the last year.  When I returned to work — with an enormous smile on my face, despite feeling like hell with bronchitis– the pole-vaulter characteristics returned.

And I wonder, if the circumstances that precipitated our quarrel had happened tonight, after three solid days of work, after that meteor shower of praise, would I have responded differently?  Would I have said… well, what I was able to imagine this morning, but completely incapable of on Tuesday night?  Can I be as brave and crazy in my marriage as I am at work?

I hope the answer is yes, or that I’m on a trajectory towards yes.

 

Blogging as Fitbit

I am drawn to blogging again, more, pace Joan, to keep a record of what I’m thinking than to communicate with the world (although I love you, dear readers, you hardy bunch).  In my work, I am adjacent (mentally, not physically) to the world of innovation and entrepreneurship and Lean whatever (not Lean In, that’s different).  That world is all about measurement and tracking and recording, so maybe it’s rubbing off.  I’m also devoted to Evernote for note taking and record keeping, and see how valuable it is to write things down and measure the trajectory (such a start-up-y word!) of my thinking.  So perhaps that’s why I want to record more more of my inner life as well.

Also, I need a record of the good days, not just the bad ones.  When I’ve kept journals in the past (the paper days), they are long litanies of disappointments by/with/around boys and men. I am drawn to writing as catharsis rather than celebration.  But writing about divorce is also, for my purposes, writing about not-divorce.  Today, divorce seems far away.  Today, Daniel is sunny.  He has overcome a hurdle in his writing.  He is always a bear before he writes, and I knew that, and I knew that was part of what was making him unpleasant — and usually I don’t know it at the time, only later.  Today, Daniel is the Daniel that I can stay with.

(It will be exhausting to evaluate each day as a thumbs up, thumbs down, red/green/yellow light.  I wonder how this mood tracking will actually play out.  I write to learn….)

I read Life After Life over the holidays, at the suggestion of some of my very literary friends (but not my MOST literary friend and steadfast commenter, Sister).  I liked it well enough, and there’s one set piece in which the main character dies several times in the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic (no spoiler there, so don’t fuss – the whole premise of the novel, right there on the jacket copy, is that the main character keeps dying & being reborn) that actually gets rather funny as she tries to keep the flu from coming into her home in ever more imaginative ways.  To stretch this metaphor waaaay farther than it will go, I keep dying from the Spanish flu of Daniel’s moods and I haven’t figured out how not to.  Each vile mood undermines me completely.  I have no immunity against the despair they cause.  Why not?  Certainly I’ve had enough exposure.  Towards the end of last year (i.e. a few weeks ago), I was able to get some distance on them.  But that’s the exception, not the rule.  I can’t de-personalize the nastiness, even when it’s not personal.  There is something about our dynamic that, in delivery and reception, makes it seem personal.

I’ve been interrupted and lost my train of thought now.  But today was a good day.

Sick day & social media (ish)

I’m still a little wigged out by putting divorce out there (instead of burying it in here).  I found this Joan Didion quote on instagram and felt nicely justified — and I am not a Didion fan (not not a fan, just not terribly interested, and rather suspicious of the cult of herselfness):

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Well okay, thanks, Joan. Want and fear, you bet.  If I recall correctly from The Year of Magical Thinking (the only book of hers I’ve read), she also said that what kept her marriage going was not that she and her husband never wanted a divorce, but that they never wanted a divorce at the same time.  Since Daniel and I rarely want the same thing at the same time (okay, sometimes, and always we want Milo’s happiness, even if we don’t exactly define happiness in the same way or on the same time horizon), we should be just fine.

Also, because why not, when I was not really working at home today — because it’s not a sick day if you’re working, right — I did watch this Brene Brown video on trust.  Whenever I read Brene Brown or hear her speak I think, “Oh, that sounds right,” but 10 minutes later can’t remember any of it.  I generally have that problem with non-fiction.  I’m rambling.

Intentions 2016

Per my last post, I’m still in the middle, or maybe just at the beginning, of working out my 2015 intentions, so I’m rolling them over into 2016.  Pay attention. Have fun.

(Blogging is fun.) I’m continuing to think about fun, or play.  I think of myself as fun and playful, but I’m not sure there’s a lot of evidence for either. The article I linked to describes play as something that causes a person to lose all track of time.  That cuts me right out.  I wonder how many people who run households, who have picked up the responsibility for care, feeding, and clean laundry of people and domestic mammals can truly, truly lose track of time and the next thing.  My God, I am always staring that next thing right in the face.  The meal that will need to appear right after everyone else is done with their fun, so that happiness doesn’t curdle into crankiness.  Bedtime, so that tomorrow (wake up time is 5:53) will have a fighting chance at being fun, too, rather than a wreck of exhaustion.  The dog’s next walk, or ear cleaning, or teeth cleaning, because accidents and vet bills are Not Fun.  I could let go of the meal aspect, at least for others.  Of the household, I’m the one most prone to hangry. (“I hate you, pants.” Gets me every time.)

I also feel like it’s a fight to have the fun I want to have. Yesterday I spent the day in bed with a wretched upper respiratory infection (that sounds better than dumb cold).  I read the first part of Sally Mann’s memoir (what’s the difference between memoir & autobiography?), and half of Detective Inspector Huss.  That was loads of fun.  I felt like I was skipping out of all my responsibilities.  It’s easier to do that on Shabbat, when my responsibilities are put on pause anyway.  But reading in bed with a cold doesn’t seem vivid enough to be fun, or to be play.  (And in fact today, the second day of confinement, is not nearly as much fun, even though I really am skipping out of responsibilities.)  Daniel and I have very different ideas of fun and play.

That sentence brings such a heaviness to my heart.  Here’s what I’m not saying, but haven’t stopped thinking about since New Year’s Eve.  One of my 2016 intentions, really truly honestly, revolves around divorce.  And it’s not an intention not to get divorced.  Nor is it an intention to get divorced.  But divorce is really on my mind right now.  I imagine using this blog to play around with thoughts about divorce this year.

Okay I wrote it.  I’m not going to erase it.  It’s an abrupt swerve, I grant you, from different ideas of fun and play to the end of my marriage.  But it’s just one of the starting points.  My ideas of fun make Daniel anxious.  And he hates that I don’t see sitting with him & meeting his needs as fun.  And “play” to him means only a certain kind of sexual activity.  Nothing else.  Although he can be playful.  I start here and can keep going.

It doesn’t meant that I have to get divorced.  But for so long, I countered every difficulty in my marriage with the thought, “I can’t get divorced.”  Except that a few months ago, I decided that I could, in fact, get divorced, and that decision — that it was possible, not that it was necessary or inevitable — made me feel better.  It is perhaps an extension of my feelings of empowerment. I’m choosing to stay now, and I can chose to leave.

In my meditation practice, I’m working on acceptance versus resistance.  What is divorce?  Is it acceptance that a marriage has come to its end, or resistance of the other’s character and human-ness?  I don’t know.  I just feel drawn to think about this very seriously right now.  The feeling may pass (do you hear whistling in the dark?).  My secret hope is that I can get this all out of my system somehow, and turn these unnerving thoughts into fodder for a novel. I can externalize this concern, play it out in my imagination, and keep it far from my real life.

In thinking about what it means to leave, I think about what it means to stay.  I miss the Daniel of 20 years ago, of 15 years ago… maybe not 5 years ago.  I resist the changes in him and in our marriage.  I’m hugely pissed off about them, in fact.  I am tired of suffering and feeling like I am causing suffering and we’re in an endless loop of it with only moments of respite.  So that is my challenge.  To go into the suffering to get out of it:

From a newsletter that quotes Thich Nhat Hahn:

 

“We should look at our suffering in such a way that the suffering can become a positive thing.  Of course you have made some mistakes.  You have been unskillful.  All of us are the same.  We always make mistakes. We are very often unskillful.  But that does not prevent us from improving, from beginning anew, from transforming.  The Buddha said that if you have not suffered, there is no way you can learn.  If the Buddha has arrived at full enlightenment, that is just because he had suffered a lot.  The suffering was the path that helped him to arrive at full enlightenment, at full compassion, at full understanding.

 

…. According to the teaching of the Buddha, it is by looking deeply into the nature of your sorrow, your pain, of your suffering, that you can discover the way out.

 

If you have not suffered, you cannot go to the Buddha.  You have no chance to touch peace, to touch love.  It is exactly because of the fact that you have suffered, that now you have an opportunity to recognize the path leading to liberation, leading to love, leading to understanding.  Don’t be discouraged when you see that in the past you have suffered and you have made other people suffer.  If we know how to handle the suffering, we will be able to profit from our suffering….”