The Moment

photo credit: Nathan Gogo, KVUE meteorologist: https://t.co/FMkLX3XTsx

[editor's note: My mother texted me to say, "But it's a kite and string, man. KITE and string. I do not in any way identify as a balloon!!"]

It's commencement and graduation season again at my arena, a time of year when I often reflected and looked forward.

Luckily, I don't do that any more.

That isn't true, of course. I do look back often. And look ahead. I wonder what the next thing is for me. I've spent a lot of time looking at my past and using it as the lens through which I decide how to shape my present. I am getting better and better at living in the moment, and ironically, examining my past is what helped get me here.

The major vehicles for self discovery over the past 3 years have been therapy and my romantic relationships. I'm done with therapy for now, but it helped me to demolish the old foundation of how I looked at myself and to begin to build a new one. And my relationships, old ones, new ones, and changing ones, are the context in which that perspective continues to grow and develop.

There was a time in 1991 when I found it almost unbearable to listen to "Baby Can I Hold You" by Tracy Chapman, but of course that didn't stop me from listening to it over and over again. It encapsulated my fear and regret and self-recrimination for the end of my relationship with my high school girlfriend. Now, of course, I smile to remember that boy and his belief that the now was the eternal, that he would always feel the way he did in that moment.

There was a time in 2016 when I found it almost unbearable to listen to "Changing Your Mind" by Bob Schneider, but of course that didn't stop me from listening to it over and over again. It encapsulated my fear and regret and self-recrimination for the end of my relationship with the woman who helped me rise up again from the devastation I felt at the end of my marriage the year before, who helped me believe that love was possible for me again. When she ended it, it was a tragedy, I thought, that I couldn't change her mind. She was, I was sure, seeing things in the wrong way. Now I hear it differently. It's not a tragedy, it's just a thing that is true. It is not that I can't change her mind when I should be able to. It's just that I can't change her mind. Her mind and mine, they didn't go together like that. And that's OK. I can't change her mind. And she can't change mine. It wasn't, and should not be, a changeable thing, at least not in that way. And this is why it's not a tragedy that we are no longer trying to make a romantic relationship work.

This is me, learning. Slowly.

And I think of myself, the me now, the me then, the me before then, and I wonder at the interplay of the masculine and the feminine in me. Was I, or am I, not masculine enough? Too feminine? Am I not strong and silent enough? Did I not have the right balance to make my marriage work, or the relationship after that? Or the one after that? Do I think too much? Do I feel too much? Do I talk too much?

My father is my role model for what it means to be a man and for what it means to be a man in a long-term monogamous partnership. He is strong. He is silent. Because he is a man and he has bought into those traditional definitions of masculinity that speak to him through the culture to tell him he should be those things? I don't know. I don't think so. And it doesn't matter. He is who he is, for the reasons that he is, whatever they are. He has always been mostly non-verbal. He is mathematical, analytical. He lives inside his own head and does not feel compelled to express what goes on in there.

He has been through divorce as a parent, before I was born. As I went through divorce as a parent, he understood it, on a level I didn't yet, and he was there for me, offering me support both material and emotional, with an intensity, if not a verbosity, that took me by surprise. He was still a man of few words, but the words he shared mattered deeply to me. They helped me when I needed it. Similarly, he has been married to my mother for nearly 50 years. He has been in the trenches of this thing called love, for a very long time. He has shown me a way, if I haven't seen or understood that way until late in my life: be the rock. My mother has said of him, "I am the balloon. He is holding the string."

That view of my father, and my mother, and their marriage, fits well into some popular understandings of masculinity and femininity. In the modern, non-binary gender world, we work hard at not talking about man and woman but still talk about masculine and feminine energies, which do and must abide in all of us, sliding back and forth on a spectrum, regardless of genital configurations, gender identifications, or sexual orientations. I have always been emotional and introspective, and I like to talk about what I discover through that introspection. Is this too much feminine in my mix, with not enough masculine steadiness to counter my feminine chaos?

One of the things I've learned through my romantic adventures over the last 3 years is the ability to feel my emotions without holding on to them too tightly. Before, I would spend days worrying over a perceived slight, or an imagined threat. I would lose sleep going over and over it in my mind. I would relive arguments in my mind, rewriting them, re-staging them to go in my imagination how I wished that they had gone in real life. I would imagine arguments that had never happened and never would. If I were sad or angry, I worried over how it had come to pass and what I, or more often those around me, could have done to keep me from feeling that way.

Now, I'm getting the hang of this. I have learned to let my emotions pass through me. I imagine them like wind through the leaves of  a tree. I listen to them rattle. I feel the branches bend and shake. I feel my emotions deeply, as they are happening. I am often giddily happy. I am often tear-sheddingly sad. Sometimes I am angry, or frustrated, or confused, or self-conscious or any of the wide range of human emotions. The moment and the emotion that accompanies it pass through me, acknowledged, experienced, and released. I don't spend a lot of time grinding away in my mind over where it came from, how it could have been avoided or extended, increased or reduced, changed or eliminated. It just is. And then it is not. And I know, really know, while it is, that sooner or later, it will not be any more. I don't judge it. I don't judge me for feeling it.

I didn't learn this from books, or classes, or Ted Talks, though I have done all of those. I know meditation, and have done it now and then through my life, but I haven't yet been able to make myself prioritize it. The same is true of yoga. It's good when I do it, but I really don't do it. I think this brand of Eastern spirituality, yoga and meditation, talk of energy and flow and chakras, a genericized brand of Buddhism and Hinduism, is widespread through popular culture, at least the flavors of popular culture that I tend to participate in. It is the heart and soul of American self help.

Like sports talk, self help talk is an endless wall of noise. Depending on the media sources we choose, we can immerse ourselves in either the talk of sportscasters and the minutia of the statistics and theory and execution of professional athletes, or the endless talk of mindfulness and presence and energy and flow and the professional secular spiritualists. It is a wall of noise that speaks mostly to those who already value it, and it's a noise that is in itself hypnotic, meditative. It, too, is part of our bubble, our echo chamber. Like sports, spiritualism is corporate now. That's where the consultant money is, the life coach money, speaking to organizations, leveraging the power of Eastern philosophies to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of executives and their staff. I have, through classes and seminars provided by my employer, explored all manner of ways of knowing myself, but by then, they were all already familiar. Because I already had begun to know myself. And this is what I know:

Let go. Pay attention to this moment, right now, and do not regret what came before or fear what will come after. Forgive yourself. Love yourself. And these are all clichés.

I have a romantic partner now who looks at the world through similar lenses. She is focused on growth. She is open and connected. She sees fear more as a limitation to growth than a protection from harm. She feels. She talks. Sharing a similar perspective makes all the difference in the world because I have no need to change her mind. I only have to find my rhythm in the dance we're creating together.

In my love now, I will be steady. I will not worry. I will indulge neither fear nor regret. Is this the masculine, to be the rock, to hold the string, to be Shiva to her Kali? I will be open and connected and communicative. Is this the feminine, to be the flowing water, to speak endlessly of my emotions, to be the Kali to her Shiva?

Yes. No. It doesn't matter. It is me, right now. And that's enough.