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A Foolish Consistency?

We’ve all made a set of decisions or hold a set of assumptions about what works for you; how you’ve constructed a life.  In this, we’ve all made different choices.  For some, their primary dedication is to their career or a cause.  Others dedicate themselves to the family that surrounds them.  Some choose to not have children.  There are many, many large and small decisions that we make that we expect to be more or less persistent.  These so-called life choices frame a lot of  our life’s experience.  Who we primarily interact with, whom we love, and the character of the challenges we more or less intentionally face.  There are times when it’s really hard to sort out whether sticking to one of these life choices is a mark of foolish consistency or a wise application of what one knows works.

Sometimes life serves up challenges to our choices.  They can shake you to your foundation.  And, even though we view these principles as the rock upon which our lives are built, we may find that our foundations are easily cracked. I honestly don’t know if reinforcing and re-cementing the cracks is the wise action or letting things break apart.  With my old construction of my life, I found that the patch works were too extensive.  I had no choice but to tear down the ramparts and start again seated firmly on fresh soil.

And… and then I fell in love.  Yes, again.  But, sometimes head does in fact flip over heels.  Unfortunately, that relationship fell apart under the weight of polyamory. A rare and special love had to end because she’s monogamish and I’m a flaming polymore. We tried mightily to build a bridge across that divide. A crazy love bridge to support and cradle our hearts high above the rapids below. We never made it across.  But, somewhere in the middle, the bridge clearly collapsing, I wondered “if poly can cause me this much pain, is it really the right thing? Am I sticking to something that sounds good in the vague hope that something just right will come along while ignoring the bounty in front of me?” (more…)

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Time is the thing…

Time is the thing.

The imagination is limitless.

Time constrains action.

I wrote those words last year as I was managing a pretty demanding schedule, a full life.  Two wonderful kids, their activities and heavy involvement in their school; an ex-partner with whom I share both co-parenting responsibilities but also a genuine friendship on most days; a great job with challenging responsibilities that allows me to express my analytical mind, creativity and desire for deep impact; two girlfriends with whom my sense of connection and caring was growing deeper by the day; a few close friends that keep me firmly grounded with joy; and a litter of cars that feed my habit of modifying and finding ways to drive faster (in style).  It is a life virtually bursting at the seams.  Full.

Time is the enemy of desire. (more…)

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I Am Enough, The World Is Enough

I was telling a friend of mine recently that I seem to always walk around with a favorite song.  A song that’s acting like the soundtrack that describes my life or, perhaps, describes a dominant thought or concern…  So, here’s my current soundtrack that’s currently describing both a feeling and an aspiration… As I’m not completely there yet…
I think I’m trying to teach or remind myself of two things with this song:
  • I’m enough
  • The world is enough

I really started down the road that “I’m enough” when I started down the path of banishing the shame and guilt that I have built up since childhood.  This overriding since of inadequacy has been with me too long.  I’m not handsome enough, I’m not smart enough, I’m not rich enough, I’m not ambitious enough…  I’m not…. this or that.

But, you see I AM ENOUGH.  Or, more precisely, my striving to be better at things is different from my worth as a person.  The pernicious thing about this is that feeling unworthy made it more likely for me to do things that increased the sense that I’m not.  Reversing that trend has been a full two years or so worth of work…

The idea that the world is enough is more recent.  It hit me most clearly while meditating.  But, it’s also very much connects back to other strains of life’s philosophy that I’m exploring. Getting out of the deficit thinking (I’m not enough) is related to getting out of the scarcity thinking (the world is not enough). I couldn’t have grasped the second without the first.

Is there a limit to the joy I can accept?  Are there limits to the happiness I can share?  What about love?  I can love me.  I can love you.  I can love others too.  One love, does not diminish the love I feel for others.

This is an absolute REVOLUTION of my heart.  And, I don’t just mean in the polyamory sense.  I haven’t been able to love fully, in the way that I am meant to, because I have felt unworthy of love.  Even the love I feel for friends and family has been warped by this scarcity thinking.  I felt unworthy of love.  Because how I needed to love and be loved in the traditional sense didn’t fit neatly into the societal notions of romantic love, I didn’t feel I could be loved in any sense.  And so, to quote Marc Broussard, “you know love don’t find this sort of man.”

But, it does.  And, it thrives.  And, it is joyful.

Shifting from the false notion that there’s a scarcity of love that has to be metered out, to the notion that love exists in abundance and I simply need to open my heart to it to experience it, has started an absolute revolution in thinking and feeling.

I had glimmers of this notion before, but I could not fully shake off my cultural baggage.  The best example of this is my relationship with my friend Renee.   I love Renee in every way that a man can love a woman.  I’m unashamed of that.  In the end, however, it was much less important for us to be romantically linked (and all that entails) than it was for us to be linked, connected, or interconnected.  The friendship thrives because we decided to not limit our feeling, even if we limited our action.

Although my orientation to love and the abundance of joy are perhaps the most profound aspects to my simple realization that “the world is enough. “  But, it’s also changing the way I approach work.  I’m much less combative and competitive in the rawest since.  I’ve been able to separate my ambitious goals for the business from my ambition as an individual.  If I can help make everyone around me more successful, my success is most definitely assured.

So, I guess the short of it is that I’m still growing and learning.  Of course, not in a straight line by any means.  But, the trend is up and I’m enjoying it, for the most part.