Light and Dark Life

There’s a girl that I know, who I see from time to time, and who is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known.  She’s kind, generous, warmhearted, talented, beautiful, loving, intoxicating, and amazing.  The kind of person that shines, and stands out from everyone around her in a way that is both subtle and overwhelming.  In her I see the embodiment of all of the hopes I ever had for love and fulfillment in life: I could fall into her and be surrounded by her and know joy such as we humans never experience, ever.

In another world.

But…

In this world, we are separated by an uncrossable barrier: time.  I was born two decades before she was, and so I look at her and know, based on the experiences I’ve had in life, how magical and powerful things could have been with her.  She was born two decades after I was, and so to her I am invisible: a non-person who will never exist in her world except as one of those many people she was barely acquainted with and then forgets as soon as life changes.

It seems that each generation, and perhaps each human, is separated from the next by an unfathomable chasm.  And those few who can see it experience only pain, for we long for that which we can never touch, hold, be, or experience, yet which we can always see, and we live, therefore, lives of ever-increasing pain.

Noted author C.S. Lewis posited that those who die in evil, or addiction, spend eternity longing for whatever it was that they did not do right, or whatever it was that they ended up addicted to.  Trapped forever, doomed to watch others enjoy their addiction, or repeat their mistakes, never able to experience it again for themselves or influence the living, they experience only a never-ending pain of loss and loneliness and this, he says, is what hell really is.

Indeed I understand hell; for, although I am only 42, I feel that I am already feeling that pain and living that nightmare.  How tragic for me, and for all who know.

Winter is a good time.  Probably, for me, the best of times.

Winter is cold.  A time to bundle up in jackets, a time to enjoy the fireplace, a time to enjoy frost on the ground, and snow in the woods.  Freedom from sweating, from sunburn (for the most part, anyway!), from unbearable heat that you can’t escape.

Winter is quiet. Especially when there’s snow on the ground, there is a muting effect that makes the land and the world seem quiet.  People stay inside, they don’t go out as much, and the world is quiet.

Winter is dark.  I’ve always preferred night over day, although recently I’ve preferred night for sleeping most of all, and I feel the same way about winter.  The light isn’t blinding, the world’s colors are muted, and things are calm.

Winter is sleepy.  But, conversely, it’s also very good to be awake. Trudging (a word that, in my opinion, can only be used in the winter) through the snow, walking through a winter forest, following a snowy riverbank to a frozen lake, and then going in and sleeping for 14 hours, these are all good things.

Winter is the holiday time.  How strange it would be, to me, to live in the southern hemisphere, where the holidays occur in the summer!  But I live in the northern hemisphere, although not far enough north, and I love the holidays.  Christmas lights and night are priceless.

Winter is forgetful.  A time when the business and busy-ness of the other seasons is blanketed, and when much of it fades away, never to be remembered again.  A time of burying the past in the clean snow, and looking across the plains to something better in the future.

Yes.  Winter is a very good time.

I’ve been sleeping a lot, lately.  Not necessarily better, but certainly more.  I’m dreaming more, and the dreams are strangely calming in my otherwise bleak world. 

I like sleep.  I look forward to getting into my bed at night, closing my eyes in the darkness, listening to my iPod for a while, and then getting some sleep.  And I dislike waking up – I take a long time to get out of bed, because I keep wanted to go back to sleep, and to return to the dreams of the moment, whatever they are.

There’s a strange blending now. The line between sleep and wake is blurring. I sometimes feel that things are more real in the dream world than in the real world. If indeed the real world is real at all.

It’s the end of 2009.  I will not stay up tonight. I am going to bed now, to try to get back to that other world, where things, ironically, make more sense.

Farewell, 2009. It is time. And sleep is good.

I have a daughter.  Her name is Emma. You can look at the Emma Blog to see more of her.  As I write this, she is four, and is a pretty typical four-year-old: one with all the questions, and quite a few answers.

But she is a good person, with a good soul. I’m glad she’s here, in my life. Despite everything bad that has happened and continues to happen to me, my daughter is a VERY bright light in my otherwise dark life.  I am very glad to have her.

I am so tired of this life.  What is it within me that causes me to feel compelled to stay in this life when freedom calls, so close at hand? 

When I got married ten years ago, I never thought that lightning could strike me twice in the same place.  But it did.  I ended up simply moving from one selfish spouse to another.  There was no warning either time – actually, there was more warning the second time than the first, if you can believe it.  But both warnings were so small, so subtle, that I don’t think any rational person would have heeded them.

So here I sit, trying to do the right thing by staying in yet another crappy marriage rather than getting a divorce and moving on with my life, and getting nothing out of it. Do I somehow think that I’ll get some eternal reward for this?  Or is it just trying to avoid some type of eternal consequence?  I am like the man who spends his entire life doing his best to serve an angry God that is only interested in punishment, and failing at that service anyway by the very nature and burden of the tasks put before him.  It’s as if I’m being set up to lose, and the answers that seem correct and turning out to be wrong.

What to do in such a situation? The answers are at once clear, and unbearable. The "right thing" is to stay in this situation, slowly dying, watching my so-called spirituality drain away from me like syrup through cheesecloth, while I spend each day wondering how much longer I’ll wake up every morning in this living hell, losing my ability to ever do enough to merit anything close to celestial glory. There is no other option, because my child is an innocent victim, and wants and deserves a complete family. 

But by dying to save and protect my child, I am still dying, spiritually, and will never make it to the so-called promised land, here or in eternity.

Selfishness is a big problem in the world, and a big problem in relationships.  I think selfishness is the key reason most relationships fail.  The problem is that most people are selfish.  Only a rare few are really givers.

Being a giver is, in my opinion, the best thing to be, but there are several problems with givers and relationships. The reality is that relationships only work when both people are givers… and that rarely happens. If only we could find each other, and be with each other, we could, I think, be happy. But we inevitably make the false assumption that, because we are givers, the people we are attracted to will ALSO be givers, and that is where we fail.

Indeed one of the key things we as givers have to look for in a relationship is someone who will give back to us. People like us are rare, and thus finding another giver is hard. Many of us give up on the search, and "settle", and end up miserable, as I have done, twice.

But if we have the courage to walk away from the selfish people, and the intelligence to never commit ourselves to them, and the strength to keep looking and searching for another one of our own kind, then the rewards can be beyond imagination.

This does not make us bad people. We certainly pity ourselves when we are in relationships with selfish people. And those are the odds, because all people start selfish as children. As they grow up, many people remain the same, and many become MORE selfish. Only a few of them become one of us, and that makes the search more difficult.

And there are other complications. Many selfish people can become "temporary givers" – especially during the dating period when we’re getting to know another person, people tend to be more generous and caring during that time than they normally are. As true givers, we must learn to look beneath the surface and try to figure out the real person beneath. But we must do so dispassionately, using our brains as much as our hearts. Because our hearts will tell us that if we just give to another person, they will surely give back, but THAT IS NOT THE CASE.

Other factors against us are things like differences in age, location, and situation. Looks are another thing. We tend to be physically attracted to people who "look good", but looks are NO indication of what is in the heart, and we MUST remember that. I remember one girl out of my distant past who would have made me the happiest, decades ago, who was not attractive at all, but had a heart of gold. She’s married and living in Texas now, lost to me forever, but I lost her because I was blinded by her LACK of looks. How tragic. We are often told not to judge people by their appearances – how true that is, I learned too late!

Despite all of these factors, you CAN find a relationship that will work for you, and you CAN find another giver to share your life with. It may not be the person you expect, but you need to set aside your expectations about looks, age, situation, or whatever, and instead look at the true person – their personality, their feelings, their hopes – and you must invest a certain amount of time to allow their "true colors" to come out. If they turn out to be selfish, just go. There are MILLIONS more to choose from. One day, someday, one will turn out to be a giver like us. And then you will have won.

One key thing to remember is this: If you find you are living your life for someone else, regardless of who it is, and they are not fully reciprocating, then you are off-balance internally, and need to refocus. You must always live your life for yourself. Only when you find another giver who will live THEIR life for you can you live your life for them. And that is the person you marry, and have children with… and then live your life for THEM, and teach them to do the same.

Today, four officers were killed in Parkland, Washington, by a single assailant who entered a coffee shop and opened fire.  The officers were all just sitting, working on their laptops, and minding their own business, when the gunman came in and shot them.  Nobody else in the shop was targeted or injured: it’s clear that this was an execution of law-enforcement officers by the lowest of the low to which a former human could descend.

As one who grew up in the law enforcement community, my heart is filled with sadness over this tragic loss.  I hope that the assailant is found, and tortured painfully and slowly for hours before being given the death sentence in a court of law.  My heart goes out to the members of those officers’ department, and their families, and I pray that they will find peace and safety amidst this horrific and tragic loss.

Whose woods these are I think I know.  His house is in the village, though; He will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow.  My little horse must think it queer to stop without a farmhouse near, between the woods and frozen lake, the darkest evening of the year.

The well-known poem by Robert Frost has always held a special meaning for me, although not, I think, in the way it does for many.  At the age of eight, my parents purchased a computer for me – one of the first computers ever built for the home, a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1.  This powerhouse of a machine had a processor that ran at a screaming 1 MHz, a massive 5 1/4" floppy disk drive capable of storing 720K of data, and a staggering 64K of RAM – the maximum that the Zilog Z80 processor would support. 

It also came with a printed manual that I tore into like a starving child at an ice cream factory, and by the end of the first evening, following the instructions in that manual, I had keyed in my first program… one that drew little white dots slowly at random on the screen, as it displayed this famous poem, one line at a time, in the middle of the on-screen "snowfall," engraving Frost’s words into my memory, forever, just as surely as the computer itself altered the course of my life, forever.

Images of walking alone, peacefully, through a quiet, snowy wood at night have always been central to the deepest dreams of my heart.  As, I should add, have images of being peacefully curled up with a laptop computer, happily typing away at whatever little project held my fancy at the moment. 34 years on, however, I live in a place with no woods, no snow, no quiet, and no peace… and although I do have several laptops which are like comfortable friends to me, they and I "get" to do very little, spending almost all of our time together doing work, at jobs which are highly unfulfilling, to say the least.

It is barely possible for me to even hope that someday I might be freed from the noise and heat of the barren desert, and that I might, while I yet live, find the home I have always longed for, and the life I have always wanted.

But, for now, I can only see them in my dreams, I cannot reach them yet… and I wonder when and If I ever shall.  The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep… and miles to go before I sleep.

I wanted to be able to play.  But instead, I am stuck in work.  I wanted to be able to travel.  But instead, I am stuck at home.

I wanted to be with someone loving and exciting and beautiful.  I ended up with someone too brain damaged to care.  I wanted to make love on a regular basis.  Instead I ended up married…. twice.

I wanted to have children when I was young.  Now I am too old to keep up with my daughter, and the distance between us will only grow.  I wanted to have lots of friends.  But, generally, most people despise me.

I wanted to be treated honestly, and I gave honesty in exchange.  Instead people misinterpret me, and give lies to my face.  I wanted to be liked, and I gave friendship in exchange. But I am not liked, I am at best tolerated by all but a choice few.

I wanted to have the freedom to dance.  But life crushes me, and I am bound.  I wanted to have the gift to sing.  But the mountains of tears have broken my voice.  I wanted to have the time to draw, and the talent to paint, but all I can do is type, and scratch.  I wanted to ski, and swim, and ride, but now I can barely walk. 

I wanted health, and happiness, but my body is dying all around me.  I wanted wealth and well-being, but life has given me nothing.

I wanted to do things that were important, but my life is insignificant.  I wanted to be someone special, but I am just a clone.

I fight the battle daily, but I am torn apart.  I never win, but the battle rages on, and the front never moves.

I wanted to have a life, but I failed.  I took the F.  And now all I have is a lie.

I had a bad day yesterday.

I live in an older apartment on a streetcorner overlooking a park.  During the day, the park is frequented by walkers, bicyclists, soccer teams, and so forth.  At night, things are quiet.  Late-night joggers, walkers, pram-pushers, and dog-walkers go by quietly… as they should, when it’s nighttime.

But there is this one guy who, on a few separate occasions, brings his dogs down the street, and tries to control them when they start barking.  I say "tries" because he doesn’t make a very good effort.  He’s got three little yap-dogs, and when something excites them, they start barking.  All of them.  As you would expect.  But rather than pick the dogs up or walk them away, his solution is to stop, right there, and try to make all the dogs sit.  Needless to say, his efforts fail, and typically result only in more barking. This can go on for 2-3 minutes at a time – which, when it’s happening outside your bedroom window – seems like an eternity.

So last night, at 10PM, as my older daughter started complaining that she had run out of her medicine – medicine that is controlled and that only she can reorder and that she should have reordered but didn’t and now was suffering because of it and trying to make it my fault – the barking started up outside my window.

I lost my mind.

I flew outside, down the stairs, in my underwear, and started yelling. "Hey! That barking needs to stop! You bring those dogs around here every night to bark here right outside our bedroom windows! If you bring those dogs here again, I’m calling the police!" 

Okay, so, first, yes, I totally overreacted.  And I used nukes when conventional weapons or – gasp – even diplomacy might have worked better.  I was tired – tired of the barking, tired of the complaining from my family, tired of life.

And upon reflection, I felt worse, because I knew I had overreacted. And the guy’s response (not to mention the way he fails to manage his dogs) led me to believe that he must be a little bit retarded in some way. He didn’t apologize, nor did he yell back in anger – either of which would have been, I concede, appropriate – rather he tried and failed to pick up his dogs and run across the street. As he crossed the street he said "Oh, don’t go there, I don’t bring them every night, don’t go there, go ahead and call the police!"  Don’t go there?  I thought that was an odd thing to say.  After he crossed the street he literally ran off, dogs in tow, and didn’t come back – just a very strange situation overall.

So after my anger and indignation at the total idiocy of letting your dogs bark for minutes at a time in someone’s side yard wore off, and was replaced with the realization that this guy must really have been too stupid to know the difference (as in not mentally competent to be able to consider others’ needs), and that I therefore might have sandblasted a soup cracker with my comments, I was left to wonder at the total indifference of humans in general.

Because maybe this guy really is mentally retarded, which would explain the quantity of dogs, his lack of handling competence, the choice of breeds, and his response to their barking (and mine). 

Or on the other hand, maybe he’s just a sociopath.

Nevertheless, I felt bad on many levels.  I felt bad that I had overreacted. I felt bad that I might have inflicted more pain than was deserved in this situation (if indeed any was deserved at all).  I felt bad that this guy could be so indifferent, and bring this whole experience to me through that indifference.  And I had to take a stark look in the mirror at my own indifference, and how easily and frequently I dump on people just because it’s too hard not to, or I just don’t care when I should.

It’s a pathetic commentary against society, to call out its indifference to itself.  Doubly so, since I clearly suffer from it myself.  Would it be easier to care if life were better?  A moot if not rhetorical question: life isn’t better; therefore, I cannot know.