Breaking yourself

“I once loved someone so much that I tried to fix them while they were breaking me.”
~ Unknown author

Was this an authentic expression of your love for someone? Or were you trying to fix this someone, to better meet your needs and fill that emptiness inside of you? Maybe you broke yourself by attempting the impossible?

It is not your role or privilege to decide whether someone needs fixing. People choose to be who they are being, despite the self-inflicted pain of deprivation it causes you. It is their choice to be a particular kind of someone – without consideration for your opinion or judgment in the matter – until they choose to be someone else. Authentic love is possible when you accept and embrace someone as they choose to be, not as they could be or should be, according to you.

“I can’t help people by damaging myself. In fact, if it’s beginning to destroy me, I can be confident it’s not helping them.“
~ Hugh Prather

You may be able to help someone make a different choice, to become something or someone else, but only “if” they invite your assistance. Do not break “yourself” by relentlessly pursuing change where change is uninvited and unavailable to you.

Nobody will authentically change to accommodate your neediness to feel more loved. The only real change will be your diminished feelings of self-worth, the humiliating side effect of trying to change what does not want to be changed.

The unknowable reality

“Look at the tree in front of you. Are you actually looking at the tree or is thought looking at it? Hear the crow cawing. Are you listening to it, or are you identifying the sound with the bird? Can you look at somebody without the image that you have about that someone?”
~ J. Krishnamurti

Alan Watts and a subset of other philosophers, such as J. Krishnamurti, traded in the typical workings of the human brain for a reality without thoughts, mental images, symbols, and other brain sponsored filters and coloring. Their core ideal was to not confuse the map with the territory – a common slogan for this movement back in the not so distant past.

Being a Krishnamurti fan back in my college days, I would often sit cross-legged in front of a big old tree, attempting to perceive it without any previous mental or emotional associations with the word “tree” or its image. However, as Krishnamurti would have likely pointed out, my effort to perceive with an empty mind would be filled with expectations – thoughts and images – of what a tree without memories of trees would look and feel like, and so any effort was doomed to failure, and it was. My noble effort was just as ridiculous as trying to hear and know the sound of one hand clapping, another one of those koans or puzzles offered by the thoughtless thinkers of the past – the gifted or practiced ones who “supposedly” achieved empty mindedness.

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Unfinished

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”
~ Lao Tzu

Despite the inevitability of change, you pursue the finished in people, places, things, situations, and achievements. However, nothing is ever finished, despite your habit of seeking the finished within the unfinished, your desire to finally ARRIVE and say this is my place, my time, my lover, my body, my property, my talent, my success, my legacy, etc.

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Going in circles

“There are patterns which emerge in one’s life, circling and returning anew, an endless variation of a theme”
~ Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel’s Chosen

Does this place look familiar? Wait, we’ve been traveling in circles the entire time! We’re back at the same place, again! It looks a little different, but the same. Have we gone nowhere, not even one mile!

Sound familiar?

Often in life, we go in circles, circumnavigating the same old places or issues, meeting the same kind of people and circumstances, before ending up where we first began our journey.

Nevertheless, things always change, even if we don’t change, sometimes appearing a bit more ragged and run-down than the last time, or maybe occupied by a few more strangers. Tired, flattened down paths arriving at the same old same old, but eyes becoming more nearsighted with each repeated arrival, leaving pieces of the familiar old and unfamiliar new in the shadows. And so things look somewhat different, but mostly the same within one’s evolving tunnel vision.

The alternative is to circle back with new eyes, being more aware and enlightened than before, having learned a lesson or two, and ready for the next revolution with an adjusted attitude – the precursor to change.

Pit of despair

You straddle the present, keeping one foot stuck in the unfinished past and the other stomping down the uncertain future, leaving an empty space between your wobbly legs. You fill this vacuum – the devil’s hungry crotch – with all manner of dramas, meltdowns, obsessions, addictions, self-delusions, and a lifetime of meaningless fucks. And this is how you pass the time, counting down the years of a life with no present tense; feeding the universal pit of despair with everything but the kitchen sink.