3 posts tagged “reflection”

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.

 

In the past few months two women that I truly admire have left me scratching my head on my very entrenched position on virtual slavery in Second Life and other immersive online communities.

It's role play. I get it. What I've never quite come to understand is why.

Daequix Scarborough posted a composite photo that cut to the chase, inviting a discourse on a subject that represents one of the true digital divides in online culture, and perhaps one of the most controversial and likely misunderstood issues:

http://flickr.com/photos/daequix_scarborough/758894526/

On one side the image depicts a woman wearing silks, something characteristic of the Gorean rp that makes up a significant part of the cultural experiences within Second Life.  The other side of the photo depicts the same woman wearing business attire. The word "slave" flanks each half of this image. The pic's creator then pokes us with another stick, tucking the following challenge statement beneath:

" It is my opinion that in any form, women (as well as men) are slave...whether it be to one Master or many."

Talk about food for thought! I immediately "favourited" (my English teacher would beat me with another stick for trying to turn this word into a verb ... ~laughs~) this entry, and left a little comment about the powerful and provocative metaphor Ms. Daequix had presented us with. Here was her reply:

I don't always think people really get that there are many different slaves and slavers....as well as, many different freedoms. It's just in our choices.

Are we more bound and gagged by our system or by a chosen Master....are we more freed by being a kajira or no?

Enuff said! LoL..."i must the soapbox put away" (a little known quote by Yoda)

I'm so glad she opened that door a crack wider, because this is one of the things that I find myself driven to distraction by more often than not, and that I crave an honest dialogue around. Here's the "why" in my own response ...

_____________________________________________________

Actually, don't hurry on putting it away. You wield it very capably. I have to admit that this is one of those issues that has plagued me from the moment I joined SL. I never quite understood why any woman would make giving up her personal freedoms (and part of her personality?) a conscious fantasy choice in RP. This is not a judgemental statement so much as an honest curiousity and need to understand.

Part of my own bias comes from my first life where I've spent a number of years working to help free little girls from the child sex trade in various countries, including in my own. Anything that robs a woman of her right to choose and her voice essentially drives me around the bend, and that has certainly been coloured by the drama of my first life experiences with this.

It seems something entirely different to people in the context of SL, and I have to admit you are the second woman I admire who's made me do a double take on this issue in the past few months. The first is a fellow Canadian -- very bright, articulate, thoughtful business woman in first life. I've never been brave enough to simply ask her about her choices in SL at the risk of offending her, though some how I suspect she wouldn't be surprised if I did open that door.

This picture of your's was such a stark kick in the arse on the hypocrisy of our choices. On one hand there is the literal choice to rp as a slave; on the other something less obvious but in some ways more insidious because we often feel (unlike the first example) that we have no choice.

So, bravo for inviting a discourse on this! Ignore Yoda, wise old soul that he may be. I hope you -won't- put that soap box away, because you've actually hit on something that is an intrinsic part of the SL culture and I suspect is misunderstood by a lot more people than myself.

Thanks for the chance to stop and reflect, and for providing a safe forum to explore this in where some of us are simply too damned afraid to ask. Looking forward to what transpires here ...

_____________________________________________________

I truly am looking forward to the other elbows that get placed on her virtual kitchen table there, and invite you to at least peek in if not tuck a thought or two of your own in the comments section of this very thoughtful exploration:

http://flickr.com/photos/daequix_scarborough/758894526/

So thanks, Dae, for the chance to scratch a truly perpetual itch!

Whenever I'm about to reinvent myself in a significant way, I find myself reading a lot of Emerson.  Today I came across something he'd written that I'd not heard before, but I found it both provocative and essential:

     “I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.”

        -- Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Being neither American nor inclined to want to be beaten with a large stick ~grins~, I'll simply say that this observation spoke to me personally.  It identifies one of my greatest internal conflicts: stickiness.

I have always considered myself to be a very passionate person.  Having said that, this nasty little poke with a stick from Emerson's 1800's brand of wisdom has me asking myself if I have the right to claim this label at all.  I do feel things fiercely and deeply, and that is wonderful fuel spurring me on when I go running headlong into the next thing that calls.  But there's the rub: so many things do call, and my ability/desire to stick with them is often my greatest challenge.

This is a problem if you look at it in almost any light: makes it tough to stay put, stick to a career, be happy with one person, or to ever really feel full or know the true sense of the word "enough".  Some people might call it OCPD, or ADD, or simply fickle or even selfish and irresponsible.  And yet I've managed to be successful in spite of it.  While I do look back and feel at times a sense of grief over recognizing this as a deficit in the traditional sense of a person's life, I am also deeply grateful for living in the place and time I do.  In the niche that I've managed to carve for myself it's served me well.  As a journalist, being constantly propelled by "the chase" is a delicious habit.  It keeps me hungry, curious, always running after the next story to share.  As an artist, it keeps me buoyant and colourful and constantly inspired.  God bless the internet and Second Life, for those two mediums have provided the most provocative and fertile playground for the two most intrinsic parts of my inner life as a breadwinner and insatiable consumer.

Where this is a challenge is in personal relationships.  There are people that I connect with in a very rich and heartfelt way, and yet no matter how much I enjoy their company, I rarely seek it.  I do tend to hold people at arm's length.  Even my closest friends and family know what a gigantic pain in the ass I can be when it comes to simple, normal things.  I hate talking on the phone.  I don't do well with a lot of small talk, and within minutes of reconnecting I am often restless and uncomfortable again.  A pretty boring, run-of-the-mill personality disorder I'm sure, but an inconvenient one when you really do care a great deal about the people that you have so much trouble wanting to connect with in a deeper way.

There are exceptions.  It's at odds with my bleeding heart, because at my core I remain a better world scout and always will be.  My partner Baron is also an anomaly in many ways, perhaps because he's so much like me and doesn't question or seem critical of the quirks.  But Emerson's observation does have me scratching my head and asking myself how much I may want or need to confront this particular issue if I really want to move forward in my life.

Do I really have passion, or merely appetites?  Constant, glorious, intense appetites, but appetites nonetheless.  It's not that I haven't found my niche.  In fact, I've found it again and again.  It's that in spite of the thrill of the chase, and often getting what I want, I still feel quite empty at the end of the day.

I know because of the few anomalies that do exist in my life that there is a great reward attached to cultivating a more mature and intimate relationship with the people and opportunities in my life, and in my gut I know that I do want to know what it feels like to say "this is enough" and finally mean it.

In those instances I've allowed myself to let it in, what I am gifted with is richer, deeper, simpler and more enduring happiness and peace of mind.

So, tonight I'll thank Emerson for poking me with a stick, and hope that I'll be wise enough to really listen and finally choose it for myself.