When say I enjoy going the extra mile for some bullshit I promise I’m not kidding. I love elaborate shit.
There is very little I like more than elaborate human stuff.
I cannot stress enough regular people that this is a luxury. I have been spoiled for being unable to unpack the human experience. All credit to having been given the opportunity.
If you’d like some signal on this I have done full Naropa courses. I have been to Esalen. I’ve done family systems therapy. I’ve done coaching. My parents took me to a meditation retreats when I was a child.
You don’t need to make it this complicated. Look at this mean and meme you can start small. You can take pride in every bit of gymnastics along the way from here to the Olympics.
The value of an involved family versus the value of an independent life are not being well reconciled for middle aged millennials and their aging Boomers parents. And it seems to be the source of much hurt.
The sadness of misaligned values
Fantasies of a good family life that the elder generations did not prioritize when parenting their own children are now cropping up everywhere in culture.
“Do what we want you to do not what we wanted to do”
I understand how much it hurts to have family tell you they value something when they have acted completely contrary to that.
The biggest mismatch I’ve seen with my friends and their parents has been the hope that their parents would take grandparenting more seriously and being devastated when they simply don’t have any interest.
Now guilt & shame over past failures can be overwhelming as someone approaches the end of their time on this earth. Maybe the freedom at the end of life is more important than time with the next generation. Maybe those grandparents don’t want to be close to their grandchildren. Maybe they didn’t want closeness with their children in the first place. Or maybe some people only want relationships on their terms. I don’t know everyone’s personal values.
If a family didn’t live their values with their children when growing up then it’s hard to expect alignment on preferences that were never shown but only told.
I know it hurts to look at these issues in the face. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise millennials that not everyone in our parent’s generation wanted families and children. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise the elderly generation their values have to come with actions.
But coming to terms with failures in our own past is inevitable. And it’s wise to see them, own them and move on. I’ve now seen the values misalignments in every type of family. Married for 40 years, thrice divorced, mixed modern families, upper class, lower class, working class. All families have self deception on what they actually value versus what they say they value.
Families can claim something is important but don’t act like it. Acting like something is important makes all the difference. If you feel misalignment in your own relationships remember both parties have to change and find the relationship that they actually want.
I spent the day on binging a monomyth in service of focusing some attention on where we might be going if this is in fact a Cambrian explosion era. If you need a synopsis I’ll extract it from Twitter if I can find the toolsets. If you know the toolset please share them.
The fellowship of the ring will not doom the hobbits to torment and death
My assumption that property rights underlined some of this still stands. If you’ve been holed up in Middle Earth (me too nice place unclear though unclear if I’m a Hobbit or an elf or a dwarf or a wizard or an orc Or Tom Bombadil) everyone thinks Mordor somehow their pet theory or sin. It is industrialism or fascism or some combination of horrors because history becomes legend and legend becomes myth. I don’t know. Ask an autist.
Hug a hippie. Be kind to a hipster. But fight to the death for the hackers. Or pick a princess who likes trade disputes in the galactic empire. I can’t translate all the monomyths in one day.
You should prepare extra layers and emergency food and water as you would for any other storm. If you have to travel make sure you’ve got a car emergency kit.
That should include, aside from a full tank of gas, “jumper cables, sand, a flashlight, warm clothes, blankets, bottled water and non-perishable snacks,” according to Ready.gov
We’ve got a roaring fire in our wood stove and have backups for both gas heat and electricity through our solar. So we should be snug as a bug. So stay warm outside everyone.
I enjoyed a very American style Christmas Eve today. My husband and I have been so busy with professional obligations that we had not done anything to prepare for this Christmas week.
After we a did a run to the proper grocery for other necessities like satsuma tangerines (the rare Christmas citrus has a short season in December) we headed home laden with marvelous delicacies and at least ten meals for the week ahead. I was then very grateful to get an afternoon nap. So rare to be relaxed enough for REM sleep in the middle of the day.
We have done a feast of the seven fishes as our Christmas Eve meal over the years but it’s a challenge to eat that much when it’s not a crowd. So this year we’ve narrowed it down to three fishes. Technically they are crustaceans.
My hope is tomorrow will be a peaceful one of rest, prayer, relaxation and probably some movies. It will be Die Hard tonight as is tradition and hopefully A Christmas Story tomorrow.
Trying to balance everything coming at you at the end of the year isn’t easy. Joy at accomplishments and time together are the goal for family time.
But the experience is overlaid with wrapping the year and planning for what is sure to be an intense year to come. It can feel somewhat paralyzing when I consider it.
I felt like I had to sleep off a lot this weekend . I crashed most of Saturday. I seriously slept 11 and a half hours. And I did feel better.
I’m looking at an intense year and I am afraid. We can’t lose some of the battles. They are winnable ones but it’s going to take a coordinated effort from many of us. In the spirit of the Christmas season, I pray for miracles.
Ego protection is innate. Humans have quite the capacity for engaging in defense mechanisms. As I do my end of year reviews to see what I have accomplished and where I have failed I see my ego everywhere.
The types of ego protection that plague me tend to be with those all too human relationships that are closest to me.
I had to admit to myself that I’d been engaging in entirely unproductive approaches in a close partnership. I wanted more from my partner and I’d express it again and again, but I didn’t seem capable of demanding the outcomes I needed. This was unproductive obviously.
Hard feedback was given to my partner. I had to look into my own motivations for enabling a cycle of letting outcomes that didn’t match our goals occur. My own part in it mattered. We had enforced errors, self doubt, fear and all the other typical buggaboos you might expect in a hard situation.
Emotional reactivity is part of our autonomic nervous system. It’s not always right. It’s only sometimes right. And learning to tune it is part of the fun. You want to improve your heuristics over time. You will get more clarity on the world and your place in it. If you wish to persist in feeling anxious and uncertain being passive will have that effect. It literally hurts you. You have agency in deciding to address how you feel head on.
Thanksgiving is one of America’s strangest and most utopian holidays. We take a day at the end of the fall harvest season, just as we head into the darkest time of the year, to give thanks for having survived the last the cycle.
Everyone who makes it to the Thanksgiving table is symbolically finding a place of security, abundance, friendship and family. Even if it’s just for an hour.
It’s within this bittersweet context that I think being grateful for disappointment is a worthy objective. I say the serenity prayer with that thought in mind.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
While I am grateful for all of the things that went my way this year, I am as glad that I have been able to accept the things I cannot change.
The disappointments in life are endless and personal. Our own family stories are shaped by the intimate family dynamics of feeling loved, secure, safe and empowered. No childhood is without some emotional ups and downs.
If you feel disappointment it’s a privilege. You extended enough empathy and love that you could be hurt. The trust required for this is one of life’s most human experiences. To love people that have disappointed us is to find peace with forgiveness. May we invite that forgiveness into our lives.
I give Thanksgiving for being able to feel connection with full knowledge of its risks and rewards.
Her generation’s history of counter culture and inevitable rise to power has many cautionary tales we’d do well to review. The limits of starry eyed optimism and the cold hard calculations of power play out in every generation, especially as they age.
I recall her support of Ross Perot in the 92 election only to find us swept up as a country in the Clinton victory. The Clinton repurposing of a 1977 Fleetwood Mac song as its campaign anthem remains a vivid aesthetic memory from my young childhood.
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here It’ll be better than before Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone
The oddest element of this memory is that while the Clinton victory song may have won as core memory, the deeper aesthetics of the losers have a more visceral hold. My mother’s favorite song was actually used as Ross Perot’s campaign song.
Maybe I’m crazy too. Maybe we all are. Because Perot, Patsy and my mother got to the punch of the Clinton victory and America’s love affair with thinking about tomorrow.
I knew you’d love me as long as you wanted And then someday you’d leave me for somebody new
Originally published in 1934 and out of print for decades, this book by the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author is a huge, skaldic treat filled with satire, humor, pathos, cold weather and sheep. Gudbjartur Jonsson becomes Bjartur of Summerhouses when, after 18 years of service to the Bailiff of Myri, he is able to buy his own croft.
It was described to me as social realism as it follows the harsh reality agrarian Iceland, debt bondage, and the things that are lost in the quest to be free of obligation to anyone. Set across multiple vignettes of Iceland’s history it trace’s the family’s arc from servitude to owners of a sheep farm during World War 1.
It’s a sad story. The protagonist experiences loss after loss in pursuit of his independence. The dream of being indebted to no man comes up against the hypocritical fantasies of the upper classes and their own views of what constitutes a free life.
I am by no means living the kind of homesteading life of the rural agrarian Icelandic people. But the tragic losses that come as part of seeking to be less reliant on systems that enrich others (the church and local landed gentry feature) resonates. It is not easy to be independent people.
