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Interview with self:

Interviewer: I’ve noticed you’re more motivated to give up cigarettes, exercise, and work on projects. When did this change?

Self: I’ve grown tired of myself, the constant whining, the lethargy, the no end in sight mode. I was coughing like a 40 year seasoned smoker, I was tired just trying to lift Tin, and work, I was so meh over work I was beginning to fantasize about a life without work rather than a life with work I love.

Interviewer: But what motivated you when you were complaining of no motivation?

Self: A few things, a friend sent me Frankl’s book about Man’s Search for Meaning and it sort of capped off what I’ve been experiencing – that anytime I thought I had it bad, I would speak to someone who had it worse. Another was yesterday I found my mother’s letters and they were written 59 years ago but I could still hear the woman she was through her voice and I thought about how at 50 my mother’s life changed – my father died of a massive heart attack and she was forced to enter the working world again. She shook when she had to write a check, and she had no sense of who she was in space and time; she began dressing like Madonna and when I told her once that I could see straight through her dress she said, “Slips are out of style, darlin’.” And I watched my mother regress to the young woman that she was never able to really live because she met my dad so young and inherited four boys and had two girls of her own and her life was carried away by the needs of others. Suddenly given the opportunity to have her turn, she had no idea what to do with it – on one hand she regressed and on the other she became a Director of Nursing at a series of nursing homes where her sole ambition was to care for the elderly. She needed to feel needed to find her self-worth. She was 50 and had no sense of herself.

Interviewer: And you are 50 now and want to have a sense of yourself?

Self: I am 53 now and I have a greater sense of who I am than ever but I’m on the bridge – not the same one I dreamed about in Zahara last summer, not the one I have been working on for the community, but a bridge that is connecting my old life to my new life. You could say I’ve been in a funk or you could use the word transition – it’s hard to let go of who we were to become who we are. Transformation and metamorphosis are painful – just ask Kafka; I wonder if Gregor had to die in the end for the situation to improve – an American would have painted a more rosy ending. I think I like Ram Dass’s messaging a little more than Kafka’s because of who I am.

“It’s only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly. That again is part of this paradox. You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.”
? Ram Dass, Be Here Now

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2012 at 10:38 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.