Monthly Archives: January 2011

Dodging Another Bullet

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Been a wild couple of days, and that’s not just the weather, although it has been very bumpy with these winds and I’m getting weary of it.  But that’s not what I’m talking about.  As I’ve already posted here, we listed our sailboat with Vela yachts a week or so ago.  Since then an opportunity has arisen for us to move into a housing co-op for a very low rent (although the co-op fee is exorbitant), and what’s more, we found a person looking to rent a liveaboard.  It seemed a win-win: we get to move ashore and someone helps us with our costs.

But we saw the place briefly last night, and it’s not very appealing. We know one of the folks who live there and we went over a lovely supper and chat, but over the evening, I developed a bad cramp in my neck, and my mood fell. It’s a good thing we were watching a British comedy, but by the time we got home I was quite despondent. I tossed and turned all night but couldn’t figure out what was bothering me so much. Eventually Tracy and I talked, and it came pouring out of me.

The place reminded me of so many years living a safe, dull, empty life in the suburbs. For over twenty years I tried to do it as so many others did, which was living to own, living for a home. Where a safe and secure home was the be-all and end-all of life. An inward looking life, a small and safe life. At one point, I found myself with the feeling of just waiting to die. And I was only in my mid-thirties. That’s when Tracy and I broke up.

Unfortunately, I fell into another relationship that was the same, but worse. During the time Kim and I lived together, it felt like pretty much everything we did was about the home. Both of the homes we lived in were fabulous, but all our energy went into being home, decorating the home, or shopping for the home. Antique became a verb. I became one of those sad spectacles, an IKEA man.

My problem was that it was utterly empty for me. Meaningless. I tried to make it meaningful and at times it was, but so little of what made me uniquely me was engaged in it. Life was so fucking dull. I was waiting to die again.

How did I get there? I didn’t really know where “there” was because it just seemed normal to me; everyone lived that way, or at least appeared to. I thought there had to be something wrong with me that the “ideal life” seemed so pointless.

How I got there is a long story, but my world had been turned upside down when I was a teen. I went from an adventuresome, outward-looking and hopeful young man to a person who needed thick walls between him and the world.  I lost myself for the next 20 years, trying to find meaning in a life behind walls. I suspect an awful lot of men find themselves here.

Ten years ago, I made some very significant changes to my life; they were very courageous changes, but still those walls remained.  I reached out further and further but the feeling of imprisonment began to rise inside me again. When we moved aboard, that was me hitting the ground running, intending to never look back. I saw our new life as just the start to even greater movement towards a limitless horizon. Unfortunately and not surprisingly, a life of chasing an empty horizon is not what Tracy is about. She still needs those safe walls, and so after 45 months she is ready to return to them.

And that brings me back to last night. I looked at that suite and it reminded me of those decades lost to living in such places, of surrendering to fear. I was horrified. Needless to say we won’t be taking it. We will live aboard until we sell our yacht, and then I will decide where to go from there.  I’ve talked about traveling in the bus. And I just discovered this website where you can sign up to help people sail their yachts. It’s a huge database of skippers looking for crew, on boats located all over the world. Even if I can’t sail my own yacht to the Carib, I can join someone who is already there. Moving ashore doesn’t have to mean putting on shackles again.

Having written all of the above, I’m deeply aware that my position is very anti-Buddhist. A true Buddhist doesn’t fret about such things. What “I” want is unimportant because there really is no “I”.  There’s just a bundle of memories and instinct and thoughts that are driving my life. I’m aware of the inconsistencies, and all I can say is that I’m a work in progress. I tend to go back and forth between the Buddhist view and the Western view of self. But it would be wonderfully ironic to spend a life trying to discover who I am, only to realise that there is nothing to discover!

On another note, I wanted to comment on an unseen and unspoken danger of cruising. I’m talking about running aground on Fat Island. They don’t teach you about this in sailing courses.  My weight has been pretty stable over this last decade, but the last summer was a killer for me. While cruising can be a psychologically taxing effort, it only requires a minimal amount of physical movement. After all, you are living in a space ½ the size of a garage. I tried to cut back on grub, but the lack of exercise and the beer all tallied up to an 8-lb weight increase that will almost certainly stick with me.

I have a weird metabolism that really hangs onto fat. The year we went without a car I was cycling everywhere, everyday, and also worked out a gym, but I was lucky if I lost a pound or so. I was in very good shape, but my belly stuck to me like a big old barnacle. Like a built-in PFD.

I need to offer a correction to an earlier post: a friend pointed out that unlike my assertion, not all single adults want or are looking for a partner. While I know a lot who are, it does assume too much. Likely many people are happy without one, and these days I’m wondering that too! But I appreciate her pointing that out.

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Death Rides a Pale Horse

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Starting over.  Those are hard words for anyone, but it’s even more challenging for old farts.  I’m not sure why, but it’s not just me; I hear it all the time from guys my age, although for most of them it’s starting over with women, which presents it’s own challenges I suppose.  If I was single, I’m not sure I would even try at this stage of the game.  Easy to say when I’ve been married so long, but from this vantage point it’s not hard to see the price that one pays for long term commitment to others, having a family and so on.  Of course I have the vantage point of having such a past, and who knows what I would say if it was from the perspective of a man who spent his life as a bachelor?

I used to take pity on those.  I imagined them as a little pathetic, lonely, lost, unable to find love.  From where I am now, I see it as potentially more of an active choice and not just evidence of relationship failure.  I used to view them as men afraid of relationships, men too wounded to let anyone close, and that may be true, but it might also be true that they balanced the cost/benefit thing, and found that they were better of being alone than being 1/2 of something.

At any rate, I don’t think there is a wrong or a right in either.  Different paths, that’s all.  And since our paths become us, we cannot judge because we are judging from the place of someone changed by our choices.  There is no blank slate from which to judge.  Funny how in physics we learn that we cannot observe without altering what is observed, and it’s the same in life.  The observer is altered by his choices.  We ponder on our lives and make choices based on those observations, and yet when we observe later in retrospect, our observing has been changed.  Looking creates changes, and the changes change the looking.

There’s something important in this, but it’s just outside my vision at the moment.  I think T.S. Eliot was reaching for something similar:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

I suspect the anxiety with change that increases with age comes from a long history of battles lost and won, memories of grief and pain, and the fact that most often we lose far more than we gain in life.  I think that applies to everyone, not matter how successful the culture may say you are, because social/cultural success comes at a huge personal cost.

Sounds extreme? The evidence is there: look at the spirit of children, and compare that with any adult you know.  Life is always presenting us with battles, and over time the scars build up.  We lose energy with age of course, but perhaps that’s less physical deterioration and more that our energy is being sapped to maintain this wobbling house of psychological cards.  It’s rare to see people lose fear as they age.  Although it’s common for people to achieve personally significant things later in life, I believe that’s more a response to the foul breath of the reaper than a loss of fear.  Hearing those bones rattle in the wee hours can motivate a lot of people to accomplish stuff while they still can.

Scars create timidity, and rightly so. It’s our biological nature to shrink from suffering, and by the time you’re 50, you found a lot of hurtful people and places, most of which you carry with you till the end of days.  I look at my own reluctance and can see that clearly.  In my personal case, I’ve learned that I can get anything I want.  I always have.  The problem is that with some very few notable exceptions, once I arrived at where I thought I should be, it turned out to be very different from my assumptions and it wasn’t where I wanted to be.  Sometimes year’s worth of hard work went to naught.

Research has showed us that people are very poor at predicating outcomes.  And the problem with walking your own path, is that the road is unknown and you have no idea what the conditions will be like.  A sign may point to a lovely destination, but when you arrive after a long walk, you discover that plague has burned through the village.

After that happens a few times you start becoming a little more cautious where you walk.  In fact, it becomes much easier to just stay home.  But if you choose that option you might as well swallow a handful of benzodiazepines and drift off listening to a Coldplay CD.  I get the image of Tracy as a devil, pushing me out of my boat by prodding me in the ass with a pitchfork.  It’s for my own good I suppose, I was getting too damn comfortable.

Funny thing that I can push offshore in a howling gale and just feel alive and a real rush, but starting a new life feels so much more daunting.  Where to go?  What to do?  I could simply carry on as I am, as a Jack of all Trades writer, counsellor, handyman, home renovator, but now would be a good time to take stock of where I am.

Who Am I? The Middle Age Identity

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It’s been a challenging week over here on the good ship Fainleog.  I’m not complaining at all because it’s almost all self-inflicted.  Consider it the shadow side of growing as a person. I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone, but I’ve never known anything of real substance that I didn’t arrive at except through pain and sacrifice.  This is perhaps why feel good self improvement guides may be limited; you cannot grow except through hard work and dealing with a lot of difficult stuff.  The fact that it is by choice doesn’t make it any the less real.  Or easier. But you have to take faith that the sun rises again – until it doesn’t, at which point it doesn’t matter.

My son Stuart and I had a very tough time together sailing this fall.  I will keep saying ‘till I’m blue in the face that sailing brings out what is real.  We really got on each other’s nerves and many bad feelings came up, old hard stuff from his adolescence.  He still carried the rage he felt towards me for controlling and bossing and judging, and still carried my grief and pain at having the child that I so dearly loved turn against me and make me his enemy.

At my suggestion we saw a counsellor and worked out a lot of old pain.  The greatest relief for me was when he told me that although he hated me back then, now he is so glad that I rode him because it’s helped him know what to do and how to make a go of it as a man.  When I heard him say that, I broke into tears.  All those years of being the asshole, the tough one, the one the kids couldn’t stand because I demanded things of them, was finally acknowledged as being worthwhile.  It was so hard for me and so painful, but I knew it was the right thing to do, and I pushed my way through years of being triangled and alienated by those I loved the most.  Unfortunately, Tracy usually indulged the kids so it was left to me to set limits and expect things from them.   That made it three to one, and I wasn’t popular.   But I was in the right.   And I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Since the counselling, I feel much closer to my son.  And I feel a lot of old baggage has been left in my past.   It feels good to let that go, but it’s change and a transformation that takes energy.  There was years of hurt and resentment packed away, suddenly cast off.  I mentioned last week about how my relationship with Tracy is changing, how we are individuating and our roles are transforming.  It’s a good thing, but again, change takes energy.  At a physical level, this kind of change means actually rewiring your brain – changing neural networks.  Like running a marathon with your mind.

Transforming my relationship with my wife and son is a lot of emotional work in itself, and takes a lot of energy.   But on an even larger scale, my relationship with myself is changing in very profound ways.  It’s what I’ve wanted for a long time, but by god it’s tough.

It’s an old truism among counsellors that when one person changes, it changes everyone who that person is in relationship with. Tracy is bringing about change by taking us off our boat.   I’m responding to the (immanent) change by changing myself.   I’m not sure exactly how they are related but I can see the results.  It’s like another adolescence in a way.

This change is forcing me to look closely at my beliefs, values and assumptions about my world. I suspect it’s the last step in the unwinding of my old family life.  I went almost straight from my parent’s home to a family with Tracy.  We met at a young age, and my individuation was incomplete; I went from a partial me, to a me as a couple, to a me as father in a family of four and then five.  Three and a half years ago, I left the family of five to go back to a couple.

And now I’m looking at me as an individual again. Not that Tracy and I are going our separate ways physically, but in some ways, the liveaboard thing was a reaction to the many constrictions of a long domestic life.   I don’t need to react to that anymore so I’m willing to let it go.   The family is gone.  And unlike when I was that very incomplete young man who bonded with Tracy as a teen, I’m much more aware of who I am, as an individual.  My roles as determined by others, by relationships, are over.  Now what?

I find myself scanning my very young past for clues as to who I was. What did I love, what motivated me?  Although I’m a far more complex creature then I was as a boy, the essence is exactly the same, and that period gives me clues as to the nature of my heart.  After 30 years of being defined at least partially through relationships, the nature of self becomes rather cluttered if not actually obscured.   The challenge for people our age is to figure out who and what we are outside of relationships.

I think that a lot I’ve pursued in the past was a reaction to both the demands and constrictions of my relationships and so has limited utility in decided what to do now.  As a boy I was always wandering and exploring.  I was insatiably curious about my world.   I loved to create and analyse and know.   I loved writing.  To some extent I was a loner.   I hated restrictions of any kind, and would often skip school.  I was also shy and quiet. If that’s a rough base of my identity, how do I manifest those characteristics as an adult man?

I’ve seen a close friend of mine go through much the same process. He too married young and inexperienced, and a few years ago separated from his wife. It was a real struggle for him, especially trying to figure out who he was and what he needed as a separate individual.   He’s come a long way since that time, and now fiercely defends his new-found independence, which creates it’s own difficulties as he is reluctant to test the strength of his identity in a new relationship.  His concern is understandable as it can be difficult to maintain one’s “self” in a dyad, and the consequence of failure is a diminishment of identity.  We all want to be in a relationship and know love, but not at the cost of who we are.  How to navigate that remains a crucial challenge to all of us.