Rearranging the Deck Chairs

I had a dream a few days ago. It didn’t mean much at the time, it just seemed silly, but the meaning became clear yesterday. I had a lot of dreams that night, but this one is the only one I remember. That seems how dreams work for me. when I wake up, I can remember snatches of many different dreams but only one is clear enough and detailed enough to recall.

This dream is set in sunny California in the early 60’s. The whole thing looked like a 60’s glam movie, with long, low convertibles, beautiful people, and bright sunshine with saturated colors. It took place in a large parking lot, mostly full, that seemed to be at the beach. I watched it all in third person, the person I take to be me was driving this blue convertible. The “me” in this dream was a “Rock Hudson” type with a pretty girlfriend, at least that’s what she seemed, she came a went throughout the scene. Everyone seemed happy, almost movie musical happy. You’ll see why that’s weird in a minute.

The whole parking lot was flooded with water. Over the doorsills in some places, a little lower in other places. Nobody seemed to care. My car was full of water that sloshed around as I drove. I didn’t look like I cared, smiling and happy. I drove around the lot for a while then found a new parking space where the water was a little less deep, actually below the doorsills. Maybe I thought that the water in the care would drain out. After I parked, the girlfriend re-appeared and I sat there, with my arms wide open, face up to sky, eyes closed, smiling like this was the best day ever. I watched this from above, like it was the ending of a great movie. Roll credits.

Yesterday it hit me, what it means. The water is the “sludge” in our lives and we spend our lives “being happy” and trying to find a place where the “sludge” is, perhaps, just a little shallower. And we celebrate if we find such a place. 

I was struck by the superficiality of the whole thing. Beautiful people, fancy cars, beautiful location, nice clothes, but we all ignore the sludge, for the most part. But we do spend a lot of time “driving around the parking lot” looking for a place with less sludge. Nobody every tries to leave the parking lot. Funny, huh?

What is “sludge?” All the crap that weighs us down, fills our time, yet, ultimately, never adds anything to our lives. Worries: About money, about what people think, about things we can do nothing about. Fear and hate: About just about anything. Fear and hate are two sides of the same coin, you distrust what you fear, you’re fear what you don’t like. 

We are all afraid of stuff, whether we admit it or not. (Not afraid of anything? What about “uncomfortable?” Are you uncomfortable around certain people, in certain situations, with certain subjects? “Discomfort” is mild fear, it doesn’t take a whole lot to turn “discomfort” into something far stronger.) The common way you’re supposed to deal with fear, is that you find the source of your fear and remove it from your life. Then you will “feel safe,” right? Except that doesn’t actually work. No matter how hard or how far you push your fear and discomfort away, it always finds you. I know how that works. I’ve lived in “unsafe” areas, then I get a chance to move to something better, and, for a while, I feel much better. Then, I begin to notice things, and hear things, neighbors talk, incidents on the news, and before long I feel “unsafe” again.

What are you afraid of? People different from you? Be it appearance, income, education, age, beliefs, clothes? The government? Liberals? Conservatives? The rich? The poor? Climate change? Poison, in your food, water, medicines? Look around you and you’ll have no trouble finding people who want to stoke your fears, for their own ends, and once they’ve go you hooked, truth no longer matters, facts don’t matter, all that matters is the “it” that “they” want you to fear. And it’s so easy, because the fear is always there, inside you, just waiting to be pointed at someone or something. What fear? The fear that they will all find out those things we hate about ourselves.

Ever wonder what the fear-peddelers get out of it? Think about it, they all want something and are willing to scare you into giving it to them. They want your money, time, support, or just the attention. There’s always some hidden motive, because, if they were on the up-and-up, there’d be no reason to use fear to sell you their agenda. The thing is, the world has a lot of problems, but none of them are unsolvable! We have the knowledge and technology to solve or, at least, mitigate, everyone of the world problems, and the only reason we don’t is fear: Greed is fear of not having enough. Conservatism is the fear of change, or losing what you have. The need for power comes from fear of loss of control. Bigotry, of all kinds, religious and racial, including misogyny, is fear of anyone who is different. There is enough of everything for everyone, money, food, living space, if we could only get over all the fears. 

So, in my dream we were all perfectly happy, walking and driving around shin deep in sludge. We enjoyed the sunshine and our fancy cars while carefully ignoring the mess and the reality that the sludge was rotting out the cars, inside and out. We cope by vying for better parking spots, with less sludge, but nobody considers leaving the parking lot. That would require leaving behind your car, your status and the “parking place” that you have worked so hard to secure. In the real world, things aren’t so cut and dried. Getting rid of all your material things, and walking away from you responsibilities and obligations doesn’t free you from the sludge, It’s not even a necessary step. The sludge is inside and, once you start cleaning that up, what you manifest on the outside will naturally follow as a natural consequence of your new values. In all things, it doesn’t matter what you have, or what you do, it’s why you have it or do it. Intension is everything. 

In my journey of a thousand miles, I have faced and expunged many hidden fears, small and large. They are usually linked to traumas, so the fears vanish when the traumatic emotions are acknowledged and released. This is difficult for us Westerners, we are taught to “forget about it,” and suppress any hurt, “get over it, nobody wants to know.” We are so uncomfortable with feelings. Or we dwell endlessly on how we feel about what happened, which just reinforces the trauma. Neither of these is helpful. It always comes out and haunts us, making us easy prey for any fear monger that comes along. It doesn’t matter how smart and logical we think we are, or how confident we are that our religious or other beliefs protect us, our sludge is there, effecting every decision and coloring every opinion.

The solution that I teach is to use a combination of tools and practices, including hypnosis, with meditation, shamanistic and other traditional and new-age concepts to discover, uncover and release the trapped emotions that keep us stuck in past events. This removes the “scales from our eyes” and allow us to see the world as it is, not as we feared it was, and the fears begin to melt away. This process takes time, and that’s good thing, for having too much change all at once would be a tremendous shock to our system, but it’s not so bad because it pays dividends all along the way. The slow progress allows you to adapt your lifestyle and values as your inner landscape changes. Many people want a new life, without, you know, actually, changing their life. They want to world to treat them differently without changing the way they view and treat the world. That, of course, never works. The simple and powerful fact is, you change yourself, you change the world. Anything else you do, from success seminars to positive affirmations, is no more that driving around the parking lot, or, as some say, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Maybe it looks good, and may even make you feel like your acomplishing something, but it's untimately fultile if you're expecting any real change in your life.

Fingernails Break

Today I find myself desperately trying to hold on. Hold on to what, I’m not sure. I just have this feeling of holding tightly to something in my core habits or ways of being. It’s like I’ll lose myself if I let something out. I feel like a balloon, and if I let out even a little of what’s inside, I will lose everything.

I’m not sure what it is I’m afraid of, though I think I’m trying to keep from changing. So much of my life has changed that, perhaps, I’m seriously trying to keep something of my old life intact. I can almost see my hands clenched and tired, but still grasping tightly to this, something. I don’t want to let it out. It feels like, if I’m not careful, what little there is left of me will escape and there will be nothing left. An empty shell. Everything that I value will be gone and I will be just some kind of ghost, without substance, meaning or purpose.

Up until recently, I had structure and rhythm to my life. Things I had to do, was expected to do. Duties and obligations that filled the time and used up my days. They left me empty and frustrated, but I had a niche and my life had rhythm. Now that is all gone. No one depends on me. No one requires me. I seem to have ultimate freedom, but I am still trapped within my expectations and self-imposed requirements, all still based on what was. My work schedule changes every week, and there is no one around be that keeps a regular, daily or weekly schedule. I never realized how much of my life was structured around that weekly rhythm. I feel totally lost without it. I am having a really hard time keeping track of the days. It is so disorienting to not have a rhythm to life. It never really come home to be before how the internet and digital recording has done away with TV schedules. So that rhythm is gone as well. There was a certain amount of comfort in knowing that certain things would be happening on certain days and times.

I expect that this is a period of transition. At some point I will let go of what I was, as frighting and difficult as that will be, and become something else. I know, I know that most of what I miss really didn’t exist, it’s made valuable only by it’s loss. I didn’t like it when I had it, but now that it’s gone it seem infinitely more appealing than the unknown staring me in the face. On the other hand, I now find myself going back to my roots, writing and reading again, but not as I had done before. I find that I want to out in the world much more than I ever did before. I want to be with people, being alone is just plain lonely. In that sense, my current job is a godsend. I get to spend my time interacting with people all day long, and there are no important decisions to be made, everything is straight forward, right now, and I can completely forget about it when I go home. Nice.

Everybody knows that change is stressful. But it’s one of those things that is hard to grasp until it happens to you. I think this is probably the most drastic period of change I have ever gone through. This time, there is truly no one in it with me. Or, perhaps, there are, I just need to recognize them.

This change didn’t happen all at once, of course, things have been shifting for years. This was like the earthquake that happens after years of two forces moving in different directions. They finally reach the breaking point when something’s got to give. Then, when it does, the disruption’s considerable, as it shatters the pretense of sameness and normalcy. The break scattered my life into pieces and now I am trying to reassemble them, but I don’t know which pieces to keep and what the picture is supposed to look like.

I have be re-architecting myself for a while now, a process that had been hung up on the immovable forces in my life. Things I thought couldn’t be changed, or that I didn’t have the strength to change, or survive it I did. Yet change they did, and now, like pulling a thread from a scarf, I really don’t know when to stop. Everything is intertwined, and the fear, deep down, is that I will completely lose something vitally important, if I’m not careful. So I’ve dug my emotional fingernails onto some intangible core that I want to preserve. Ironically, I also have the fear that I’ll, by being afraid of change, I’ll make some commitment that locks me back into those old patterns that I’m trying to be rid of. Maybe my fingernails will hold, maybe they won’t and maybe they shouldn’t. My path forward is as clear a mud at night. I just hope that, in my stumbling and bumbling, I don’t make any mistakes that can’t be corrected.

Change Hurts

Change isn’t easy. Any change is a real pain in the butt. Even if you need it, even if it’s really necessary and you know it, It’s still a royal pain. It seems like it should be good, it should be really great to Get Past, to Be Free, to get “out from under,” but it’s still filled with petty problems and annoyances. Sometimes it feels like it’s never going to end, it seems like the goal will never get here, and, at the same time, I dread the looming deadlines. I want it to be over, but I don’t want to pass through all the crap that is between here and there.

Sometimes it’s not so bad. Other times I’m depressed: I want to cry, I can’t seem to focus and I want some routine to fill the time. Often, I just don’t want to think, and, sleep is hard. I suppose it’s the constant stress. I don’t know where I’m going and the prospects don’t look real good. Things are too expensive around here but I’d rather not move away. On the other hand, if you must, you must.

I managed to find some work, but that’s hard too. First of all, it’s a major step down from a 6-figure engineering job to Home Depot. My ego has some adjusting to do. And I’m not making enough to break even, I will have to continue to live off my savings. That hurts. It really brings home the debate about minimum wage. Years ago I could work jobs like this and make enough to get by, but now it’s hard to see how that’s possible, with rent and food and insurances constantly going up and wages have hardly changed in 30 years. I always got this point before, but now it’s more personal. All those years of minimum wage jobs used to be in the past, but now all that’s in my face again. I would have hoped that after 30 years, I would have earned some degree of choice in my life, but it seems like most of that is gone. All my choices lead to difficult outcomes.

My options were to stay in an unhappy marriage, with all it’s emotional frustrations and the endless “putting up with,” or to go it alone. With the kids gone, that means really alone. It doesn’t help that I let my wife define my social life for most of those years, not having any friends, or family, of my own. In the last few years, I have begun to change that, and now have a group of casual friends and acquaintances. Most of them have never met my soon-to-be ex, because she wasn’t interested in meeting them, being involved, or pretty much anything that’s important to me.

I made the mistake of letting her define who I was. I entered into this relationship so desperate for someone to like me that I was willing to put up with pretty much anything, thinking I could manage it. She took full advantage of that to try and remake me into, I don’t know, something acceptable to her and her friends, I suppose. I put up with a lot of it, because I thought that was what you do, that is what marriage is all about. You do things together and do your best to get along. It took me some time to figure out that I was on a never-ending path of subservience. It was a power game. I would never be good enough, there was nothing I could do to get the approval I needed to feel good about myself. No amount of success or doing or giving in would ever make things work.

For a long time, I would try to include her in my interests. At first, she acted interested, then, as time went on, she pulled away from all that. I thought that we should do things together, so that meant that I pulled away as well. It took me a long time to understand that I was erasing myself. We only hung out with her friends, her family, doing things that she wanted to do. The classic pattern of being under the thrall of a control freak. I know she has a different point of view here, of course, but this is my take, and I’m allowed to believe what I want, even if she doesn’t like it.

Various events and awakenings caused me to question the life we had. Not just my marriage, everything. I really tried to take her along, but she wasn’t and isn’t interested. I learned a lot from watching her and others along this journey. What I saw brought home the truth of something I’d heard when I first started. When I first began to understand the power that was available through breaking away from the common mold and awaking, I was told that you didn’t need to worry about the wrong kind of people gaining access to the kind of abilities that could make the dangerous, because their very nature would make that impossible. And then I watched, as this played out among all the people that I met on this path. Most of them interpreted the teachings and insights in terms of their existing world view, instead of changing their world view by accepting the teachings. I could see how that was limiting them and, in many cases, stopped them cold. That made me sorely question my own thoughts and actions. Was I going to use what I’d learned to further my agenda or was I going to adapt my agenda in light of what I had learned? This has been an on-going struggle. There are times when I feel like I’m doing a good job, and then I get slapped in the face with concrete evidence that I’m not being true to my values. I understand, intellectually, that this will be a process that will never end, but emotionally it hurts. I still want to “get it,” to understand, to “have it down” so I can feel like I’m “done.” But that’s never going to happen, and that really sticks in my craw.

My strong suit is to learn. That’s how I tackle every problem in life: I study to understand and accumulate facts. That works very well in any endeavor where knowing facts equals success. Unfortunately there aren’t too many of those in life. There’s always social stuff, the fuzzy subjects, that refuse to be reduced to facts and numbers and procedures. I’ve gotten that I need to face my fear in those areas of my life where I felt completely out of control. That it’s ok to not always be “in control.” Trying to control everything is what made my life miserable. It caused me to slowly back away from anything I couldn’t control, which is pretty much anything, so my life kept getting smaller and smaller. Giving that up is freedom, but it’s also really hard, which brings me back to where I started: Change is hard.

Things around me are changing. I have to change. I have to make decisions that will effect me for years to come and there’s no right or optimum answer. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the near future, and that keeps me on edge. Control is gone. People tell me when to work, where to be, what to do. My everyday choices seem to be evaporating while the hard choices won’t get done. I keep telling myself to trust and everything will fall into place, for the reality is that I can adapt, no matter what, but I don’t like it. I want there to be a clear path ahead of me that I know leads to the right place. Not having that hurts, physically and emotionally. I am starting to learn to reach out to friends for support, but it’s never enough and I’m always worried about using up their good will. So I ask as little as possible. I hate not knowing what to do when the situation is so important. Even meditation isn’t the comfort it was, probably another symptom of stress. I want to think this marks a transition, but, for now, it’s just one more unwelcome change.

I want to end this on a positive note, but I’m having trouble. I really wanted to write something and get this stuff out, but I’m having a hard time feeling the upside right now. There is one, I am sure, but it doesn’t feel that way now. I am so looking forward to having everything resolved and being on my own. I’m going to have to build a new life, boo, but that’s really the point of all this, isn’t it? They say you can’t cross a river in two jumps, and now I’ve gone as far as I can by just inching along, I either have to take that leap into the unknown, knowing that there is no going back, ever, or give up. I know I’ll look back on this, one day, and see it very differently, but for now, I’ve jumped and I don’t know where I’m going to land, and that friggn’ scares me.