Catch and Release

I remembered a time, when I was young, probably 10 or so, when I used to get up early in the morning and go fishing. In a rather cruel form of childhood recreation I used to catch and release blue gill. I guess I got to feel somehow powerful because I could bait these beautiful but hungry fish onto my hook. I never once, in my childhood, thought about what these fish might have been experiencing. That memory haunts me, as I recall being caught and released.

When I had the stroke I had no idea that life had just caught me. But, I would learn. I was drug out of the water of everything I had ever known. No matter how I wriggled I could not free myself, in fact the hook went deeper. I could have died, perhaps should have, maybe did die in some ways, but was ultimately thrown back in, to live another day in waters that have been forever changed by the hook, and the journey of being caught and released.

Life has become a more complex experience since that time. I no longer believe that what seems to be, really is. The darkness seems to be so deep, deep enough perhaps, to make the light really bright. The more I know that I don’t know anything, the closer to the truth I get. The waters, once they changed, keep changing, and I am lured and landed with each shift. I have a kind of post-traumatic memory. 

I am, because of the vividness of losing, still there, still caught — something hard, inscrutable, exists in me, a gut-wrenching recollection — and I am in the shock of re-birth, of being tossed back. There is nothing now that does not remind me that this moment is fleeting and that radical change is always here. I am caught, horrified from time to time, by the same perception that releases me. I am in the flow of Life but I am not that flow.

I have a hard time being around someone who is bored. I don’t get boredom in the midst  of a natural disaster, like the recent earthquake in Japan. I want to yell, “Wake up! Wake up to the near-death experience you are having.” That is how caught I sometimes am. I forget that I have also experienced release. I am disillusioned, and thereby freed of old limiting beliefs. I am diminished and thereby enlarged. I have had my life taken away from me, and thereby been reintroduced to this improbable miracle I experience as new life.

Being caught always, being released always, makes it hard for me to participate in the day-to-day life that goes on around me. Sometimes I feel crazy. How can anything matter so much? What am I doing here? What’s really going on here? I am caught in a world that is crazy-making, filled with so much pain, despair and hopelessness. I am simultaneously released into that same world and it is unimaginably beautiful, aware, and exquisitely alive. Frequently I am just confused, weepy and uncertain. I can’t even really explain it, to myself or to anyone.

I’ve tried to think about it. Is there anything I have brought back from the edge that I can give my fellow beings, my friends, my community, my kind? I was reduced to nothing, to helplessness and hopelessness (I had to be, in order to learn), I was suspended there for a long time (I had to be, to be rendered available), caught by who knows what, and I am being brought back to life (I’m learning to praise Creation).

You’d think I would have something. I do and I don’t. I know this isn’t the whole story, and I know it is a mixed, more complex story than most of us have been led to believe, and I guess now I know that not-knowing how to live in this mad-dash world is appropriate. I wish I could say something more solid, but there appears to me to be nothing solid about the world, or perhaps it’s just me.

I recall how banal was the cruelty of my childhood passion for catching and releasing fish. I remember that I read the Book of Job during my ordeal. I was looking for some way to make sense of the suffering imposed upon my life. I have never overcome the experience I had of the darkness of God, the inscrutability of the Void, the carelessness of evolution. Now I rest on this brink of time, alive with possibility, quivering, knowing that it is all passing so quickly, and deeply thankful, that despite everything, the years of hopeless longing, I have one more chance, that I exist, caught and released into this life.

Solitude In Relationship

I’m in frontier land. And, I’m way off balance. Nothing new about those conditions, I guess, except I’m not alone this time. That fact makes me feel more responsible and gives me a little more incentive. I like having the opportunity that a new friendship affords me. There is a particular challenge however, that I know is bound to crop up, and I want to see what kind of gumption I’m going to need to face this relationship inevitability.

I’m talking about losing myself, and my tendency to lose contact when that happens. I’m savvy enough as a relationship/systems therapist to know that if I let this friendship become significant enough to me, I’m going to have a hard time holding onto me. What is so special about me? Why does this even matter? Well, the short answer is that I’m all I’ve got. If I get lost, for too long, then I will surrender my ability to relate. I will hurt me, and I might hurt someone else. And strangely, it might be because the relationship is too good.

You can see why I might be apprehensive. This is probably a case of knowing too much. I have worked with a lot of couples, and a few communities, where someone went absent because they couldn’t hold onto themselves. I’m a believer, that relationships are “people growing machines,” (Schnarch) that there is an inevitability to the way a relationship eventually eclipses personal development.

I am not really interested in losing myself. I’ve worked hard to get to know me and it seems I’m a better person for knowing myself, certainly I’m happier. But, all of that occurs out of relationship. If I want a relationship, and I do, then, unless I’m going to condemn this budding opportunity to a predetermined distance, then I’ve got to find a way to regain my hold on myself when this relationship exceeds my expectations.

The working theory I have now, the desperate hope I’m clinging to, is that my relationship with myself can be strong enough that it will never go away for long. I don’t know if I can trust myself that much. I know I’ll find out, if I let myself proceed into this relationship. I’m willing to find out, and I’m knowing that there will come a time, when I won’t have the capacity I need. My relationship with myself is going to reach its limits. This is what a good relationship is guaranteed to expose in me, the reality of my self-love. I know this is the good and the bad news of caring about another.

I don’t like knowing my own limits. It hurts too much, and is filled with such self-doubt. Still, I also know that this is the real gold, the true reason for relationship. I get to know the truth of who I am. I also get the chance to become someone else, someone more, someone who has gone beyond who I used to be. The problem is that I don’t know if I’m going to grow myself until I get there, and find out how I need to grow myself. The risk of relationship is not just that I might be rejected by someone else, but that I might reject my self. I might not confront myself, and become what I need to become, to love another, to love myself, as I need to.

I’m banking on solitude. I came to really know myself by hanging out, and cultivating a relationship, with me. I know, as a marital therapist, that people don’t generally enter relationship to be alone.  This form of aloneness, I’ve learned, is also inevitable. I can’t tell you the number of times someone felt that being alone in their relationship meant something is wrong, with their partner, with themselves, or with the relationship. I’m counting on being alone. I won’t have anything to bring to another if I’m not.

Aloneness paradoxically looks like the relationship path I need. I know that if I am going to be myself, and remain true to me, then I have to stay in constant relationship with me, at present that looks like more solitude. Maybe there will be a day when my grip on myself is so solid that I will not be in jeopardy of losing my balance, but that day doesn’t seem to be here. Till then, I will have to practice the paradox of solitude in relationship.

Wish me luck. I’m going to need it.

The Rut

This morning I’m reflecting on my own tendency to corral and trap myself. I have just entered a friendship with a new person in my life. This is a source of great joy for me. But, it is also a reason for soberly looking at all of my past relationship ways. I have some patterns I would like to forego. I don’t want my anxiety to determine how available I am in this friendship. And I can’t help but see that when I lose myself out of anxiety, or disconnect for similar reasons, I have repeated a pattern that I have been hurt by many times, and that I have hurt others with just as often. It all seems to be related to the way (the rut) I choose to live.

I’ve been talking with my new friend about the very human tendency to create systems of thought and activity and then to get captured by them. I know I can, and do, frequently corner myself in this manner. I have actually been aware of this tendency for a long time. As a psychotherapist I work, almost daily, with people (individuals, couples and groups) who have created for themselves the prisons they are struggling to free themselves from. The once-imagined mansion on the hill has all of a sudden become the prison cell.  And, this happens over and over again.

I don’t much like knowing this. I know I am not immune to it. My mansions, my systems, have become the ruts I trap myself, and others with. Although I know this is utterly human and probably unavoidable, I chafe against this knowledge, this self-defeating and pain-causing attribute of who I am. I have even gone so far as to imagine that I should wear a sign, much like the surgeon general’s warning, that says “danger — relationship with this person could be bad for your health.”

I haven’t figured out a way to escape from the prison-building rut-inducing warden of myself yet. But, I keep trying. And failing. I take some solace from a friend of mine who is a developmental scientist. She says that one of the states of adult development, that is seldom reached, but possible, is what she calls “construct-aware.” That means, as I understand her, that one can achieve a state of awareness where one can realize they are creating constructs, I think she means favored belief and action structures, systems or ruts in my terms, and through awareness, not be captured by them. I hope so.

In the meantime though, I am saddled with the unsettling partial awareness that I am creating these elegant ruts for myself, and maintaining distances with my latest versions, and am unable to stop myself. Every direction I look I am implicated in causing pain and restriction. I wish that weren’t true. I’m afraid it is though. I don’t really take comfort from knowing that this is an aspect of the human condition.

What can I do? Right now, it seems that all I’m really capable of, is creating suffering, and being aware that I am doing it. I have compassion enough for myself to know that being aware, of the damage I’m causing. is something. But, I want to stop it. Or, so I tell myself. The trouble is, and it is deeply humbling to admit it, I don’t know how to stop. Do you? If so, please help me. If you, like me, are a perpetrator and victim of your ruts, then you have my heart-felt sympathy.

Maybe my new friendship will be a help with this. We have talked about it. We have tried changing things around to avoid the ruts we know about. But, I haven’t yet admitted, until now, that I am totally caught in the web I keep spinning. I can’t seem to help myself and I know I am dangerous.

I want to do better. I really do. I know that the kind of relationships I am capable of, and the kind of community I build (and allow), are governed by the ruts I create, and indulge in. I spent all of last year writing, and thinking about freedom, and the tyranny of the self, and this is the amount of progress I’ve made with my on-going struggle to free you, and I, from the one in me who governs what I do.

I am glad to have come this far, to know my real responsibility for what is happening, and I feel sad and desperate. There is nothing grand about the suffering I do, or the hurt I create. Forgive me! And forgive anyone else you know who is doing it. This is part of my brokenness. It is part of my poignant, mysteriously imperfect humanity. In truth, it is part of the nakedness with which I arrive at this our shore.