2 posts tagged “choice”

Change

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I am writing because I have to.  I need to.  It's how I sometimes process things that feel too big: talking out loud, writing in a diary, here in a blog where the people you value might have some nugget of wisdom to clear the smoke.  Right now I'm listening to one of my favourite songs:  "Change" from Tracy Chapman's "Where You Live" CD.  I've tucked the lyrics in with this pic on Flickr.

Rambling alert: this is the "talking out loud" part ...

The past few months have been increasingly chaotic.  It's an odd thing to say when the past year was actually one of profoundly poor health, and this is the part where I'm supposed to breathe easier because I'm getting better and most days feel pretty damned great.  Thing is I'm having one of those "Aha!" moments where you cannot breathe at all because you're hovering between the grief of leaving the old and familiar behind, and that incredible feeling of anticipating when you're brave enough to let yourself imagine new things.

Why is it so hard to change?

If you're not entirely happy with the status quo, with parts of yourself or your life or your choices, then why is it so damned hard to let them go?  Human nature is contained in such a predictable set of boxes at times, one of the big ones being this false sense of safety and normalcy so long as we keep doing what we're doing, whether it makes us happy or not.  We learn to a certain extent to control things and survive them by developing a handful of coping strategies.  Sometimes that means giving up on dreams, or unhooking important parts of ourselves like feelings or needs or pieces of our character that are actually very important parts of who we are.  I know because I've done this, over and over and over again, for years.

I have little notes scrawled on pieces of paper around my desk, tucked into favourite books, slipped under a coffee cup.  One of the ones staring back at me accusatorily right now says this:  "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results".  Pretty damned wise.  So why is it so hard to take to heart and translate into some sort of meaningful "do something"?

Do something.

I've said that phrase hundreds of times.  I'm usually saying it in light of my role as a better world scout.  It's a challenge statement as much as an invitation, and rolls off my lips as easy as could be ... until I listen to it in the context of my own life.

In March of 2003 I was driving home and stopped the car only two blocks from my house.  I turned and looked at my kids and said "something big is coming.  I don't know what.  I don't know what it means for us, but I know it's going to turn our lives upside down and we have to be ready".  A week later I got the phone call.  My mum was dying and my father had collapsed, and I had to go home to ... well ...

I had to leave my own family behind, young kids, and make unspeakable choices for my parents that haunt me to this day.  Not to belabour the details of that time in my life, but I'm thinking of it now because there is that same sense of ominous foreshadowing going on the past few days, and it leaves me restless and full of anxiety.

I don't do well with the unknown.  I'd rather have the difficult news full on, however bad it might be, so I can begin to wrap my head around it and prepare.  Essentially I am a control freak, and what I know I can set into order to whatever extent I can.  I don't like my back against a wall.  I don't like not having thought things through so that I can react intelligently and safely and sanely when the time comes, whatever "it" might be.

What's driven me to sit myself down and simply write about this today is sort of the perfect storm of coincidences in my life at the moment: personal, professional, community, all of it.  It's like the universe is conspiring to dump me the hell out of that comfy bed where I'm hiding under the covers and right onto my feet pointing, frowning, saying "Choose!"

Sounds like a whole lot of hubris going on ... ~laughs~ ... but this is in fact how it feels right this moment.  Sometimes coasting along is okay, if the choices that placed you there were healthy and wise.  Sometimes it's just lazy and irresponsible, and at the moment, I guess I'm leaning toward the latter.  I've got a handful of decisions to make.  Some of them are really bloody hard.  Other's have been taken out of my hands completely.  In any case, here I am, at a turning point, recognizing that like it or not it's time to choose, and if I'd let myself believe it, the perfect time to see the opportunities I've just not been brave enough to consider.

Am I brave enough to walk away from a career that's made me a public figure and provided me with some of the most incredible moments of serendipity in my life?  Do I have enough faith to believe that I've got the power to create something better and that really fits?  Do I have the power to walk away from an online community of better world scouts that I've been part of for three years and that is soon shutting it's doors, and figure out "what next?"  Do I have the power to imagine myself as something other than a fulltime mum when that part of my life is over so very soon?  Am I brave enough and do I have enough faith to hang in there with personal relationships that are in turmoil because of life's changes?

I've always considered myself to be strong, brave, a person with great conviction and faith.  Today I'm sitting quietly, feeling very uncertain, and recognizing just how comfortable it's been to live with the status quo.  Thing is, it hasn't made me very happy.

So now what?

I'm trying very hard to dig down deep to see if I have what it takes to reinvent once again, not on one front, but on many, maybe simultaneously.  I've watched someone I care about very much doing exactly that, not easily, but bravely.  It gives me hope, and yet I feel like such a coward.  What's familiar is comfortable.  Sometimes you have the luxury of choosing to piss your life away continuing to walk that path until it's very deep rut and almost impossible to get out of.  Sometimes the choice is taken out of your hands.  In any case, when you're standing there at that turning point, it's scary as hell.

Mostly, this is just talking out loud because it's how I wrap my head around things that I really don't want to be thinking about at all.  Doing it in my blog is admitting I don't have it all figured out, and because I'm wondering how other people find the courage to make big changes in their life and get on with it.

I think I've nearly worn the tracks off of Chapman's "Change", and yet I just looped it again, because I still need to hear it.  I really need to hear it today.

I'll be the first person to admit that I use my blog for purely selfish, cathartic reasons.  Sometimes I use it to hold myself accountable (if I say it outloud, I'll do it).  Sometimes I use it to celebrate something wonderful in my life, first and second.  Sometimes I use it to work through issues that are bugging the hell out of me, or simply beyond my grasp.  This posting is the latter.

Tonight my youngest son was attacked.  I'm struggling with this for a lot of reasons, including the obvious ones like not being able to protect your children from things no matter how well you think you've prepared them.  I've got another monkey on my back tonight because my son was -where- he was -when- he was because of me.

He called this evening to ask if he could stay at a friend's house much later than planned and if I would then come and pick him up.  On asking a few questions I found that he'd not been entirely honest with me this morning when he went there.  He rode his bike to the other side of town, requiring that he cross a number of our city's most dangerous intersections, and he's lost his bike helmut.  My rule was no more arse on the bike until the noggin' is covered, but he rode in spite of this.  He went both where he was told not to, and how.  I was angry when he called because I felt manipulated, and the car wouldn't be home until much later in the evening, so I told him no I wasn't able to pick him up and that he could not stay any longer, and to come home straight away before it got dark.  I also told him to expect to sit down and have a talk with me when he arrived home.  My last words to him were "please be safe!".  He hung up.  I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, but it was in worrying that he might have an accident on the way home and that he wasn't wearing a helmut.  For almost an hour I sat fretting, feeling guilty as hell that I'd put him back out there on that bike to come home.

When he walked through the door, I nearly passed out.  He was covered with cuts and scratches, had a black eye, stomach stripped raw like sandpaper, head hanging down and walking with a limp.  He'd not been hit by a car.  He'd been jumped.  Because he knew I was angry he took a shortcut home -- one where there wasn't a lot of heavy traffic, but it was one of the roughest sections of town.  As he crossed the bike path on the train tracks to go into the park, two boys jumped him and beat the living hell out of him.  They yanked him off the bike, got him down on the ground and started kicking him repeatedly in the stomach, face and head.

As we sat talking to the police, it was all I could do to keep from falling apart.  He was someplace he shouldn't have been because I was angry, and he was more afraid of getting into trouble than he was of going through a dangerous section of town.  That almost killed me.  I don't lay hands on my kids, but they do know when I am angry because of that "mum tone of voice".  I'm lousy with discipline -- often too soft -- but my kids know when I am seriously disappointed in them and they hate it.

So what the heck does this have to do with tolerance and acceptance?

It's been hours since the police left and in that time a recurring theme has presented itself again and again, first in one of the questions asked by the police: "do you want to press charges?".  Why did I feel guilty about that?  Later when my son was safely in bed and sleeping, I turned on the tv to watch West Wing to try to settle myself down.  Two separate storylines wove back and forth, both underscoring age old conflicts between both countries and peoples because of labels, dogma and just plain stubborn human nature.  At the end of the show, I snapped the tele off and picked up the "Developments" magazine that arrived today.  The first thing I opened to?  An article dealing with those same age-old conflicts between cultures and people, and the seemingly insurmountable nature of quelling them.  A glaring fact in the particular issue dealt with by this article?  That one of the main reasons there was so little impetus to change was the almost "inexhaustible supply of slaves".

Of course, this lead me back here, thinking about the very emotional conversation we've been having as we've planted our elbows in this virtual kitchen table.  I've been sitting and thinking for some time on this.  There are a handful of things I keep coming back to again and again.  Conflict happens for a host of reasons, but there are some that are well within our control to change right now:

1)  We can choose to listen actively and without judgement to our peers.  In meetings I often catch myself "tuning out" the person speaking, waiting for them to hurry up and finish so it can be my turn to speak and I can present my own point of view.  I'm not really listening at all, and I'm certainly not interested in being swayed to their point of view.  In joining a discourse if our goal is merely to hammer other people over the head with our own position and spin, we're already in trouble.  Taking the time to share our thinking, especially when it's emotionally charged, should include a commitment to find some level of mutal understanding, whether we agree with each other or not.

2) We can choose to put issues in the center of the table, not people.  I'm the first to admit I've had a good rollick coming to the rescue of a friend or two who'd been bashed by the fashionistas on various blogs.  I was full of righteous indignation, and on some level felt justified in doing a reverse character assassination on people I felt desperately deserved it.  Regardless of motive, when attacks become personal, they are damaging, rob us of our integrity and make it almost impossible to get beyond position and spin.  One of the hardest things for me to choose when I arrived in Second Life was "acceptance", not "tolerance", and there is a difference.  About 5 years ago a friend of mine gave me a sound kick in the arse for not groking that.  Tolerance implies that we are merely "putting up with" people who are not the same as we are, or who have a different point of view.  Acceptance means celebrating that we can have different beliefs and opinions and still have common values and common ground.  Working to find those things provides an awesome foundation to build on.

3) We can choose to practice non-violent communication.  This is not an intrinsic part of my nature when someone messes with my kids!  Nor is it an easy thing to practice when someone shares an emotional point of view that just plain pissed me off.   A few years ago I met a woman who introduced me to the idea of this.  When I became profoundly ill again last year (one of the more unpleasant symptoms of my illness was not only depression but rages) I chose to actively seek out the principles of non-violent communications because I hated that my words were hurting the people I loved most.  Most recently a lovely woman introduced herself to me as a colleague not only here on Vox, but also as a Second Life citizen and someone from yet another online community that I care deeply about: omidyar.net, and she too teaches NVC.   I suppose it's not a coincidence but rather serendipity that keeps presenting the notion of "non-violent communications" in my way.

Not only does the net at large throw us into one massive bowl of raging diversity, it gives us places like Second Life where it is in our face in all it's glorious colours.  Gor, furries, gender-benders, age play, mafia, violence-based roleplay groups and a veritable buffet of issues-based rp that may or may not synch up with our personal values.  We can react in fear, shield ourselves with indignant epithets and absolutes, or we can choose to say "fuck it -- I'm going to open up and actively listen, and while I may not like everything I hear, I'm going to allow myself to expand the personal context that I have in which I relate to people".

Two things lingered when I sat quietly tonight and had to deal with the very mixed emotions I've had today, some because of the loaded language here in the slavery thread which at times makes it feel like a minefield, and some because of two young men who chose to hurt my son and the fact that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time because he was worrying about my being angry with him.  The first thing I kept thinking about was something that my brother said to me when my mum was dying a few years ago.  He tucked a little book about compassion into my hand and paraphrased one of the most important parts for me, and the thing I hung onto most was this:  the more anger we fill ourselves up with, the less room there is for the good stuff.  The second thing I keep thinking about tonight is this:  that whether or not we agree with the notion of slavery as part of active roleplay, the entire concept of freedom is based on the right to choose.

Yes, there are people who enforce their will on others.  Yes, there are people who are not well equipped to make healthy choices and will fall prey to people who will exploit them.  These things, however, are not the entire picture anymore than I am representative of all women in Second Life.  On the issue of slavery in roleplay, as I continue to see unfold more and more throughout the course of the very thoughtful discourse before this, there is also a healthy, informed choice made and exercised by smart, compassionate, healthy people who find in Second Life an outlet to explore an aspect of themselves they might not otherwise be able to choose.  This is not synonymous with sexual exploitation or lack of consent.  It's the right to choose.

I don't just tolerate it, I accept it, and I continue to want to learn more because of the immense respect I have for the people who have stepped forward to continue to talk.

How entrenched are we in pushing a personal agenda?  Do we have the will to ditch the position and spin long enough to actually listen to an uncomfortable point of view?  Is it possible to have an intelligent dialogue with a diverse group of people and not only -not- kill each other but learn something along the way?  Based on the "slavery" thread before this and how it seems to be unfolding, I'd say "hell yeah!"

F. Scott Fitzgerald had a nice way of summing up the challenge we have before us:

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the abilility to function".

Not on the crazy train just yet ...