Writ in Water
October 14th, 2009
And there. It’s fall. The sunflowers burnt out, the drizzle yesterday lacing a wind that was slapping dry leaves mercilessly, so that the walk to pick up Rainer from school felt like a scouring, my outside state complementing my windswept interiors.
I think I’ve stumbled across resolve, some small sureness, that paradoxically throws everything into question.
I am startled when I am overtaken by a strong opinion or moment of resolve, which, really, shouldn’t seem like such a big deal. I think there’s even an old expression about opinions being like a part of an anatomy which every one has one. And it’s not as though I never have opinions. I have a friend I didn’t speak to for a year when we were what, twenty or something, because we disagreed over something that was so ridiculous that if I put it down you won’t believe me, you’ll think it’s hyperbole — but, if memory serves? it was over whether pop culture of the ’70’s or the ’80’s sucked worse? And I am so averse to conflict that I think this disagreement marked the beginning of a period of preferring not expressing opinions to fighting over them, and the opinions I hold I tend to hold tentatively, prefacing “of course, you might not feel this way, there are so many other ways to feel” which when you have to put in such an obvious preface, what exactly is the value of it?
The um, James Wood dust-up two blog entries ago? Where I felt practically as if I had started a flame war for merely citing somebody who has different opinions than some people I respect a lot? Yeah. That’s sort of typical. I love goodreads for helping me keep track of what I have read, what I want to read, what friends are reading, but the very act of assigning stars or writing anything like criticism? Freaks me out a little.
This is not something I particularly love about myself. As much as anything delights me about my boys, I love that they comfortably hold opinions different from my own.
And the easiest way to describe what it feels like being me, is that I sometimes feel like water, taking the shape of whatever container I happen to be held in, being as agreeable and as pleasant as I can in the name of getting along, and not at all sure what shape I would have were I not suitably contained.
And then when I am not happy it seems like I have a tendency to wait passively for things to change. Because they do, always. And I don’t know how to be different, only that it’s time for me to start growing here. Which is terrifying, I haven’t a clue how even to start, and all I can guess is that it is like the children’s game of hotter and colder, one has to start moving, slowly but steadily so that as one gets closer to or further from one’s objective, one gets hotter or colder. And it’s the trying to discern for myself what constitutes feeling warmer, it’s like trying to wake up a sense that has been numb. A friend assured me that I don’t have to be able to imagine what happier looks like from right here, and I tell myself that I will just do little works of removing obstacles to the happiness even if I am not sure I believe in happiness.
And this is stinky hard to write about. I don’t want it to be so vague as to sound like cloying self-help nor so specific as violate the privacy of the people whom I am engaged with in this process, but writing about stuff is how I know how to move forward. Silence doesn’t feel right. So I put this up to say, here I am, struggling along, and it might not look so epic from the outside, but as uncomfortable as it is, the notion that I can own this and shift from a passivity to a sort ownership of my own life seems like a good place to be in.
