New Beginning (Again)

With New Year's barreling down on us again and the promise of new beginnings, I am hearkening back to where we were this time last year. I wrote about finding new solutions to old problems and trying a new door as an alternative to slamming ourselves against the same door that never seems to open. And there is some good news on that front. What I learned in the past twelve months did not originate with me, although I pat myself on the head for having the wit to pay attention.

First off, I've come to accept that life is inconvenient. While there are plenty of contemporary gurus who offer "the key to getting everything you want, from money to health to love" (suggesting, as they do, that if you really WANT a 20,000 square foot house with a rooftop helipad, it's yours if you understand that WANTING magically ensures GETTING; which makes me always wonder how annoyed people must be when they find out they could have avoided devastating monsoons and starvation if they had only had the sense to WANT a favorable climate and enough food), my observation runs contrary.

It seems like it's the human experience to get sand kicked in our faces and it's a bit naļve to expect that any of us should be immune from heartache. Most of us have been cheated, conned or had our charity abused. Friends and partners betray us. We deal with incompetent professionals and selfish relatives. We survive painful addiction and debilitation from illness and depression. Our pets pass on. It is loss and disappointment and shattered dreams every which way we turn, and that's all on a good day when no one we love dies.

And I'm not a hapless innocent in all of this. When I'm being honest with myself, I recognize that I've played both the victim and the villain in my personal drama. While I've tried to step lightly, I've done my share of unkind acts and created a fair amount of havoc for other people. It's the way life goes. We're all experimenting with our personalities on one another. This all used to drive me absolutely crazy. I believed I couldn't be happy and peaceful until I tidied up all the loose ends, resolved all of the hurt feelings and set myself on a course of joyful, problem-free living from here on out.

Of course, this has been very wishful thinking and every New Year that becomes more and more clear as the years begin to pile up. The old hurts and betrayals didn't go away. The regrets hung around like a mysterious smell. The past kept bogging me down like a pair of damp socks - soggy and comfortless. But, here's the good news…this year, I GOT HAPPY (mostly)! I learned something kind of obvious, and I didn't have to write in my Abundance Journal or watch "The Secret" over and over to get there.

What I learned (besides the part about life being really inconvenient for everyone) came to me from my very wise friend, Anna, who passed on a conversation with HER very wise friend, Susan.

Anna and I have been friends for many years. We know the minute details of each other's lives since we've been witness to most of it. Over the years, we've developed well-worn story lines…and by "we", I mean "me", because she's a rocket of consciousness and I am…well…not so much and I'm way more prone to this than she. You know how this runs; you meet for lunch. One person says, "how's work?" or "have you met anyone?" or "I saw your ex at dinner last night" or "how's your mother getting on?" You may as well have hit the "enter" tab on your keyboard, because most of us are off and running with nary a pause.

I have my little compendium of stories and am ever so happy to tell them to you…yet again. There is some variation - if I like my current job, I may not regale you with the many jobs I had that I DIDN'T like, where I was horribly mistreated and my coworkers were not only brain-dead, but embodied pure evil.

There are some tales that I never tire in the telling. There's my childhood saga (ask about my mother and you will gather dust while I tell that story for an afternoon); my marriage tale of woe (ask that question and I'll fill up hour after hour proselytizing about the perfidy of men and the inadvisability of marriage in general). Ask about particular friends and I am oh-so-happy to hold forth on what's wrong in THEIR lives, and how they never seem to get any better at solving their problems (not like me). I'm nothing if not consistent, and I know other people who are so much, much worse.

(By the by, this is by no means exclusively female behavior. Men drone on with The Story of My Unsatisfying Job and Deadend Career, The Story of My Transportation - will we never stop hearing about the dual carburetor on the 1970 VW van? - The Story of the Incompetent Idiots I Have to Deal with Each and Every Day, The Story of My Cold and Crazy Wife/Ex-Wife and, the ultimate cause of it all, The Story of My Mother just as often.)

I might have kept this up indefinitely, certain that you yearned to hear me retell every nuance of every Bad Thing that's ever happened to me, if Anna hadn't passed along this little morsel from Susan over lunch last June. Susan said to Anna, "You know, I've just decided to stop holding my friends hostage to my story."

I like to think that my head snapped up from my field greens salad with caramelized pecans and pan-seared goat cheese medallions and I exclaimed, "Eureka! I have found the secret to life-long happiness!" That is, for pity's sake, stop telling that damned boring story about yourself and get on with your life!

I should say that I'm not referring to painful loss, grief, and illness, here. I'm not talking about the devastating events in your life where you really need to talk and find comfort in the support and affection of your friends. Nor am I talking about traumatic events that have long echoes in the present, like abuse. That's hard core life and I do not suggest that you'll get past those experiences if you just stop talking about it. I'm talking about constant disgorging from the divorce in 1994, the childhood that ended in 1972, the career you've had for fifteen years and you loath but seem disinclined to try anything else. The well-worn rut of thinking and perseverating over events and people that just hang around in your mental complaint file and are relived ad nauseam out of pure bad-habit. If your divorce of twenty years ago is only a bad memory, it might be time to delete it from your story line.

If you can't do it for yourself, at least do it out of kindness to your friends who have had to listen to you with polite attention for over twenty years and have become hostages to your complete unwillingness to become a more interesting friend.

I wasn't able to recover over-night. For a couple of months, I had to stop myself from indulging in a litany of my grievances every time someone kind person ask how I was or what was new. When someone would mention certain third parties with whom I had an uncomfortable history, it took iron self-control to resist launching into all the ways I had been mistreated and how that person deserved to be friendless for eternity. But I got better, and as I got better, an unexpected benefit began to emerge…I got happier.

Apparently, whatever you turn your attention to will take up a certain amount of energy and emotional investment. While I felt totally justified in the validity of my feelings, I think, maybe, rehashing old grievances was interfering with my ability to enjoy my present, and was putting a damper on my hopes for the future. Perhaps, revisiting unpleasant experiences made it just a little bit harder to come out of an emotional nose-dive after every episode.

Having lost my lexicon of old stories, I found myself talking more and more about the present…the intriguing, exciting, frustrating and joyful events and people that are filling up the hours of my NOW. My conversation turned more to the places I want to travel, the things I want to learn, the books I'm reading and want to read, and the projects of today. As I started telling new stories, the old stories lost their power. It's not that my days became transcendentally joyful on every front or that I'm exempt from annoyances or despair, but I think that, lately, I'm better equipped to take it all in and move through it.

So, thanks to Susan and thanks to Anna for providing a new solution to an old problem. It's the New Year, and if you have had any piercing insights or wisdom you've stumbled across, please write and share with the rest of us. Lift that bushel off of your little light and let it shine.

In the meantime, Happy New Beginning! May our collective journey around the sun be an amazing and wild ride.

Previous column

Next column

Ingrid is currently living and respectably employed in Austin, Texas with a firm specializing in environmental law. She hopes to get back home to the San Juan Islands next spring to stay.
While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane." Besides a passion for Tiki Studies, Ingrid is borderline biblio-obsessive. She is an old-school Libran - i.e., she won't be leading the Revolution, but she'll work to make it an attractive affair and hire the musicians and caterers."

Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com

news@sanjuanislander.com

ABOUT US | ADVERTISING INFO | CONTACT INFORMATION |