September 20th, 2005
You know, restrospection is a dangerous toy ... a softening of the lines and a hardening of the attitudes that were once uncertainties. Looking back on our lives, we see patterns—just in the same way that we see figures in the clouds or messages in the rippling water. In retrospect, we can re-write the history of our life and subsequently lose the meaning of it. Though we may seem to be drawing the connecting lines of our own history in an attempt to draw meaning out of it, we lose a lot of the essence—our soul—when we simplify all that transpired in order to draw a conclusion.
The same, of course, can be said of any part of that life. Once you try to compartmentalize or simplify, you've lost the essence of it. You hear lots of people saying, "It's just that simple ..." but it seldom is.
* * *
I guess the reason this has cropped up in my head is because it is The Fall (my favourite season, and one I associate with Good Changes in my life), my sister Carolyn is finally home from an 8-month stay in the hospital (thank Goddess-Christ-Allah-Budda-Yaweh-El-Natura), I just finished celebrating an anniversary, and yet there is a general uneasiness in me right now. An unsettled funk that normally only hits me in the Spring when the days are lengthening and nature is waking up.
(I don't want to overstate this, though; I am not sad and/or emotionally distraught ... it's just a slight case of the mubble-fubbles.)
So my immediate impulse—more of a knee-jerk reaction, really—is to start marching back in time to find a pattern, or draw a conclusion from a set of events. I can have an almost born-again-Christian type of revelation, if I brainwash myself enough, that I have found "the real reason" in the events of yesterday, last week, last month, etc. Or worse: I could drag myself back even deeper into history and force half-remembered events of yesteryear into a pattern to match my present day life.
The danger is that, while I may be right 1/2 or more of the time, I also cheat my present-day feelings out of their due: "Oh don't mind me, I always get unhappy when the trees turn yellow and red ... and it always makes me sad when the first frost covers the grass ... [etc.]" It's not fair, and it makes me more desperate ... I would just be pushing unhappiness under the surface for a time.
A -er- former friend, in one of her wisest moments (she had several of those—especially at the start of our -er- friendship) described this like the buttons on old car radios: You can push one in and the others will immediately pop out. Push another one, and then the one that was depressed will pop out as well. She described feelings as having a similar behaviour whereby you suppress it over here, and something else pops up over there. John Stoltenberg went so far as to list some of the areas where men's feelings "pop up" when they try to push them down: Abuse of other men or of women, abuse of drink or other drugs. Warfare. Or Just Plain Assholery. His list is longer, but the point is obvious.
So, if I am already in a mild funk, then the last thing I want to do is to is ignore it by looking for a false pattern and using it to write off the feelings I am having. I don't know why I am moderately unhappy and disagreeable right now, but I won't mindfuck myself out of the chance to figure it out.
Why? Because that would make it into a big one ... and I don't really want to unleash a genuinely grumpy me onto the rest of the world just because I was not being responsible enough to figure out my own little swampy miasma. I know I've got a squeaky gear somewhere ... I'm going to figure out what it is. And I'm not going to use historical evidence to minimise it.
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