Gently down the stream

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

What a weekend!!! I could write a book on my recent trip to Washington DC to support the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. Instead, I'm going to save the fragments as fodder for bigger things down the road. For now, I'd like to talk about one irrelevant analogy that came from the hours spent traversing the continent reflecting on some loose material floating around courtesy of Anne Lamott, several friends, and my own inabilities.

I've been living backwards. And not just me, many of my favorite people have been doing the same thing. Life is very much like the plot of a story. Our more productive days often follow a familiar pattern. Setup--buildup--payoff. As formulaic as it sounds, when we mess with this process, progress is stilted and we end up doing rewrites.

The setup is about knowing one's self. It's the phase where we establish who we are, what we're like, the dimension of our past and our dreams for the future. Setup is the part of the process where we define our character and the environment we find ourselves in at any given moment. It's important. Someone without stable setup is begging for trouble.

Those of us who want to run from the unpleasantness of the past, the personality quirks of the present, or the insecurity about the future is operating with only a partial foundation. If we do not truly know, accept, and love all of ourselves and our current states of being, it is very difficult to move forward toward any sort of lasting evolution. Not that this stops us from sweeping much of the setup under the rug. All too often we try to cover up the real with the should. We try to make the "is" something it is not because we want to skip to the good stuff. We want to arrive at the boon without acknowledging the less than ideal state of affairs we are currently in.

"I'm perfect," you may claim. Very well, go catch up on Dancing With the Stars over a pint of ice cream. I'm not talking to you. However, if you're at all like me, you have your work cut out for you. How does one know thy self? Prayer, meditation, journaling, posting random thoughts on an ill-conceived blog for the world to see and comment on--these are all worth a shot. Talking to people who are already a part of the fabric of your being is good, too. Who knows? Laying the ground work for the setup is a work in progress until the one is without a pulse. Until then, I'm open to suggestions on how to form a foundation for which the rest of life can play out.

Buildup is suppose to be the next phase. Buildup is where we interact with other people, places, things, ideas, etc. in order that we can experience change. Buildup is the person who inspires new feelings, the idea that shapes our beliefs, or the challenge that exposes us to our vulnerabilities or strengths previously hidden from the light of awareness. Usually buildup is the fire we walk through in order to be reborn. It's where the magic happens. It's being a parent, finding a job, hurting a friend, falling in love, writing a song. There are endless possibilities what form the buildup may manifest as. It can be big, getting married, or small, making breakfast. Each activity and experience is all at once the metaphor for life and life itself playing out. We, as simultaneous narrators and spectators, make meaning out of life in the arena of buildup. If we try to skip this phase, we are just lying to ourselves. We are saying what we want to be true without putting our new truths to the test. Living is buildup.

Last comes payoff. This is the joy and growing sense of completeness derived from knowing more about one's self and the reality we inhabit.  It is the point we feel more connected to God, our fellow man, or maybe some tasty lamb chops. Payoff feeds back into knowing and loving the self more completely, a.k.a. the perpetual setup and buildup.

Easy enough, right? Not so much for me. I like to skip to payoff without so much self awareness, suffering, or patience. Instead of taking the time to understand the characters and the background of the now, I leap to what I want the details to be and try to narrate my payoffs early. Sometimes I focus so intently on the yahoos life gives me (and there are many), the shadows are temporarily hidden. Other times I tell myself the now is something it isn't because I want so desperately to experience a payoff that I'm not as ready for as I'd like to think I am or just plainly doesn't exist. It often goes back to trying to fill an emptiness with something or someone who doesn't fit, but I wish they did.

The way I see this process get flubbed up the most is with "love," the passionate sort, not agape. Instead of building a sturdy framework based on a healthy pre-setup foundation, we tack up some water colored paper mache, jump into to bed for some immediate gratification and call it love. Love takes many forms, fair enough. But this fleeting, often disappointing form is more prevalent amongst single middle-aged people, myself included.

It often goes payoff, setup, buildup, crash. Men and women interchangeably want comfort, orgasms, companionship, support, physical touch, to know and be known in various combinations, usually at an alarmingly fluctuating rates. We want this sort of love, built without the setup of knowing ourselves, the other person, or the working logistics involved in said relationship. We want love without the trial of buildup because we are so focused on the false concepts of what the payoff of love really is.

After the payoff of "closeness," we start trying to establish the setup by getting to know the other person and ourselves with that person. We may be shocked to find that he, she, I, or you aren't the same as the hastily scribbled image. Often we start to make deep compromises in an effort to build upon a relationship that really didn't have a chance to begin with. We ignore red flags and warnings from our contractor friends that see the looming collapse. When the house of sticks finally comes down we want to move on quickly without processing how the event feeds back into our setup, and in so ignoring we are doomed to repeat the cycle again.

Other times people, not so much me on this one, try to start a relationship with buildup. In these cases, buildup resembles manipulation because it is not based on the real setup. The payoff is often empty because one can't differentiate between the manipulations and who each person truly is. A man may tell a woman he loves her, doesn't want to live without her, he's never felt this way before. His desire becomes an irrisitable web. Who doesn't want to be wanted? It may be that he is lying to her, but he could very well be lying to himself as well. Sooner or later, heated passion cools into a growing sense of dread when his cell rings. She wants him to meet her parents? He isn't supposed to chat with other women on-line? This isn't the payoff he was looking for. Fast forward to the inevitable chewing of the arm.

Don't sit there nodding your head ladies, fickle passions are perpetrated by both sexes. As is the following shoddy buildup: There are women (or men) who feign victimhood looking for their psuedo-knight(nurse) to rescue them. Some men find playing the hero irrisistable and come to the fair damsels aid over and over. However, the maiden is never fully saved. Her plights deepen. As her demands increase, so does the day to day drama. The reality that her man can't ever save her begins to seep in and a lot of finger pointing and emasculating ensues. What happens? Eventual demolition after several painful remodeling attempts.

Does this mean we avoid looking for someone to be build a Casa de Amor? No, but perhaps by being more honest and aware, more compassionate and loving, more patient and accepting with ourselves and others we can avoid some of the waste. It all works out in the end despite our flailings. However, paying attention to the phases might help limit the pain. I'm hoping anyway.