So I am still working on this loneliness thing, like I think I have the power to solve it. I don’t. Which is why there really is no solution to feelings, only time. Time that will bring another feeling, another thing to feel and try to find a way to assimilate it into your life.
So I talked yesterday about how far back the loneliness goes. And I talked with my mom briefly about it. She had forgotten about Rex and my early child bride situation. We laughed. I was a weird but fun kid.
So if I can remember being lonely since I was three, is this really a changeable thing? I am not sure. I know that I want there to be a solution for the loneliness. But I also know that so far in life, I have only found things to distract me from the feeling, nothing to really solve the issue of feeling completely.
And I think that is because there is no solution, it is just life. Just life and the way it is. Feeling are part of life, which is super inconvenient when you feel and to some degree live like your feeling are trying to kill you. I have done a lot of really fucked up shit all in an effort not to feel some pretty basic things. Human things that everyone has to feel, sometimes.
I guess what I have always lacked is the ability to remember that all feelings are fleeting. They come in like the weather and they leave like the weather. When it gets really hot in Ojai, like now, we are not all out there running around trying to change the weather. We all instead, gripe about it, say how hot it is with incredulity like it is some anomaly that Ojai is hot in the summer (it is ALWAYS hot in Ojai in the summer) and then we go on about our lives, trying to be cooler. But none of us, not even the craziest of us, thinks that we can change the weather. Instead, we find ways to cope with it while it is unpleasant.
I think of emotions the same way. Well, at least I am starting to. I see them as unchangeable by me. The first, biggest and worse lie I have ever told myself is that I could and should change how I feel. This was almost the end of me. Thinking I could and should change negative things into positive ones or thinking that I could heighten my positive ones into mo betta. Again, almost fucking killed me.
But today what I see is that there really are no solutions to emotions. They are best handled like the weather - I can gripe about them, try to seek some sort of comfort while they are here but I cannot really, run from them, change them or make them better. Seems that the only thing that I am really good at is making them worse...
So I have stopped trying and instead, just allowed my feelings to do what they are going to do, which is usually warp my mind like the summer heat does. It creates an environment where I can see my own discomfort and all the ways that I have sought to exit that discomfort. And it is so seductive, that feeling that I can change the way I feel. And it is really the only thing that seduces me like that. I have no similar delusion that I can change weather. Just my feelings. Who appear hyper factual, when they are not. They are, as we say, just feelings, facts are really superfluous.
So I am thinking about feelings a bit differently, like they are not changeable by me, for me, because of me. They are just obstacles in my life (whether they be positive or negative emotions) that I have to just endure and try to get some relief from like the heat in Ojai lately.
Yesterday I escaped to Carp and Santa Barbara. And that worked. I got out of the heat and so was given a different perspective on the weather. When I left Ojai, it was fucking hot. But then got to the beach and was cold, and damp and sticky. The marine layer thick and hair straightening. And turns out, I don’t like that either. That feeling of being wet dry. And my hair? It fucking hates it, like it lies down and will not get up kind of hate. And Santa Barbara was the same. So while they both provided relief from the heat, it was only a different kind of discomfort...which was not really relief at all.
So perhaps, and this causes me so much sadness to say what I am about to say...perhaps, there is no solution for feelings, or weather. Only coping strategies to be deployed that sometimes work, often they just create new scenarios that are just as unpleasant as the situation I was just trying to escape from...
This is the story of my life.
But I have a new way to think about it, my life, my feelings and the weather. They are just temporary things, things that will pass and perhaps maybe there is nothing to really do about them at all. Just allow them to be, a passing nod of acknowledgment, like “I see you heat, loneliness or other shitty weather thing, and I am just going to get on with getting on anyway...”
I don’t know. Seems like a better use of my time then going to great lengths to deny it is hot, deny that I am lonely, deny that feelings and weather are super inconvenient and annoying.
Seems easier, at least today from my prone position writing in my bed, to just accept that weather and feelings are going to happen and they are going to change...like all the time, forever.
What if I stopped seeing these things as things to be solved or changed and I just started to allow them their rightful place in life, and moved the fuck on?
What would life be like then?
I don’t know, but I think it may be that I am just hot, or icky damp or just lonely without adding anything more to the experience.
And perhaps, my incessant need to change the way I feel, will allow me greater acceptance, greater peace within the life that I have, be it hot or damp or lonely. And that no matter what, it will change. That is really the only thing I can count on, ever.
Perhaps there is no solution for life...just a moment coming at a time, some I like, some I hate, some I struggle to survive, but always I can find a new way to think about myself, the weather, loneliness and life. And that perhaps if I stop seeking solutions to things that are not really problems, I will find acceptance, hell maybe even a peaceful abiding with all that is...even fucking loneliness.
And maybe life is more peaceful when you stop trying to solve it all the time...
Maybe?
I will let you know.
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