Making a new connection with old technology
I was on the phone (long ago in the landline days) with someone having an intense conversation. I don’t remember what it was about at this point just to show how amazingly relevant it was. However, in the middle of the conversation the line went dead. I looked around me and found that my sweetheart had hung up the phone and was staring at me with this emotionally pained expression on his face. He started shaking he was so upset and trying not to yell at me. He’d been bottling things up for a while but he just couldn’t take it any more the way this friend talked to me and demanded explanations from me for everything I did like I had to report to my teacher or something. I was an adult and I deserved to be treated better, he thought. He had to leave after that and get some air.
It is a gift I have never been able to repay, that insight into things. I thought I was doing well in life that I had examined quite a bit of the things that had hurt me and held me back in my life and was headed towards healing. But here was a whole new perspective for me. What if the people I had known forever, the way I had lived because of them, was not healthy? What if the structure that had formed my perception of life was off and not supportive of me becoming the best me that I could be? What if there was more to this examined life than just confronting the bad guys?
Very little in this life is black and white although it would be easier if it was. Love is not a light switch that turns off when someone hurts you. Just because someone does a good deed doesn’t make them a knight in shining armor. Everything is interconnected and essential yet temporary in the moment and our lives are weavings of meaning we make from our experiences and so every growing and changing. Living an examined life is just that, living it. It’s not a treatment regimen or a one time workshop or a gadget that will make everything better. It’s a way of life that allows you to find the real you under all the layers of family traditions and social interactions, the cultural mores, the educational propaganda, the religious traditions, the job/career molds, and all the other influences that try to shape who you are. It’s not a means to make you separate from all that. It’s a means to live your life consciously choosing what parts of it are real and how you will live with/in/around/through them. It’s how you build a life, not live one that is a reaction to everyone and everything else.