I was feeling unsettled this evening, and thought about the fact that I have been house sitting for two weeks now.
This transient state is one that I realize I am uncomfortable with and yet I put myself in this position, willingly, to help out a friend. A step in the right direction is that I have resolved that for 2010, I am retiring from the house sitting thing. There is no or only marginal benefit to me, and I find that it is likely not something that puts me in a healthy state of mind.
But as I explored my life over these past four years, I have come to see that I sometimes take the path that others would wish for me, they thinking that it would ultimately yield happiness for me. And I have done so, though knowing somewhere deep inside that I do it because they wish or expect it, not because I wish it. My mistake was in not having sufficient confidence in my own self knowledge to know that their suggested path will not yield that full measure of happiness for me. It is a work in progress to change this in myself.
I realized tonight that I am anniversarying my experience with Homeland Security (how I hate that poisonous name). It pollutes and makes Nazi-like my image of a country that was my home from 1972 to 2004, and gave me my wife and my children... and now holds them, and my father and my brothers, friends and cousins on the far side of a barrier that I can not cross. It is the Berlin wall of my personal life. Can it come down in my lifetime?
Maybe it is this anniversary that is making me feel this way. I want to be out of transition, I want my life back, and if I can't have my old life back (and I can't) then I want to feel that I am moving towards something new.
I am sure that to outward appearances I am heading in the right direction, and making progress. And mostly I have been feeling that I am... but sometimes my inward feeling get out of alignment with my outward appearances. How do I address that disharmony?
I would like to have a person in my life to share with, and yet I don't want to feel that I want this as a crutch or to fill a void in myself. I want to be a full and whole person in order to be able to offer that whole person to someone, and share in return. How will I know when I have built this whole person? Will it be when I no longer feel the pain of loss and the absence of someone to share my feeling with? Will it be when I have truly constructed a self-sufficient person who needs no one else? I hope not.
And yet I would not wish to burden or bring to a relationship the pain I feel, and ask them to heal it. I see people that I would wish to love, or at least explore the possibility of love, but would not wish them to take up this load that is mine... created by me, and mine to carry.
My story is stupid and self created, and I do not want to be the object of pity. What I want to build is a new life that is not flimsy and bending at the slightest wind. I want a new and strong life that is full of meaning, and beauty and my friends, and I want to be able to add love to my children's' lives, not the pain of separation.
And I want to love another.
I have some faith that that will come, and my role is to clear the path, and make ready the place to light that fire. And I can't do that house sitting in others lives. My cabin is not my own, and yet I have made it as much as I can, my own for now. I hope it will be my rough blueprint for a place of even greater happiness and beauty, shelter, and warmth, a place where love will root and grow, and I and that love will intertwine.
