When You Can't Stop Thinking

“It’s surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.”—Barbara Kingsolver

  Have you ever taken the time to try and observe the raw pictures of your memory? Take a memory--any memory--and grab you brains camera and take a quick, static shot of it. Now take a minute and concentrate on what you see once you have stopped the flowing aspect of memory.
  It is difficult.
  When I try to stop the movement of thought it vanishes like smoke dissipating in the air. When I try to make it freeze, it blows away. Or flows away like a river.
  It is like lifting the needle off the record on a turntable. The sound of the music just vanishes. Return the needle…joy. At least for those who still remember or own a turntable and vinyl record albums.
  So I have tried to stop focusing on the specifics of memory and more on the emotional qualities of them. How did I feel? What was the real point of saving that particular event? And I must admit that I notice things about my past that were unnoticed as Ms. Kingsolver points out.
  This allows me to discard or devalue some things and to embrace and be joyful of other things. Now when some memory is triggered in me, I am more able to justify the discomfort or happiness that accompanies them.
Perhaps this will lead me to laugh and cry more truly with my many ghosts.

Giving Up To Live

“Don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens - The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.” ~ John Steinbeck

This saying by Steinbeck could be descriptive of the evolution of my being, my philosophy for living. I tried to control so much of where my life was going that the sole purpose seems to have been the ability to master, to control the outcomes of the situations that I encountered. I tried to control my emotions. I tried to fix people who were broken. Fix them even when they didn’t wish to be fixed. I looked at the way that I wished things to be. I was the anti-Zen master.

That way of driving through life just left me tired and also left me without laying down any type of foundation for my own happiness. It was like I was drinking the poison meant for other people, keeping them safe from the poisons that they desired. I would drink the hemlock for the good of all, regardless if I wanted it or not. Much of my young adult life was throwing life vests to people who only desired to drown in their behavior, their lifestyles. I didn’t realize that there were certain people who didn’t care if they hurt the ones that they said they loved. A whole period of my life seems to have been grayed out somehow, just a shadowy part of my lifetime.

But there came a point where I had to root out that way of being or I would have just been devoured by it. I gave up on having any effect on the world around me. Now that may sound bad, but when I did this transformation, the opposite happened. It was almost as if I was in a dark room thinking that the light was on when in actuality I was bumping around in the blackness of my life. When I grew tired of all the misery that people were bashing me in the head with, the lights came on. I quit betraying myself to the will of others.

And once the lights came on for me, it was extraordinarily easy to look around and hunt down those personal shadows that were trailing me. For shadows have no place to hide in the light.

Mom vs. Dad

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not. -- James Joyce

Moms are the epitome of unconditional love. I see it with my own wife and her daughter. I truly believe that she feels her daughters physical pain and would take it upon herself in a flash if she could. Pulling the daughters wisdom teeth was pretty much the equivalent of the dentist pulling four of her own teeth. Plus possibly a hard kick to the ribs thrown in with it.

Moms appear to weigh in at just the right time to answer a question or offer suggestions. Me, being a man, seem to quit listening way to soon. Trying to formulate an answer to a question that I thought might be coming, but might never end up being asked. Then I get confused and anxious. Worthless to a child for any concrete wisdom. Most of the time it ends up that a daughter just wants to be heard, to know that someone is sharing her hardship by listening. Moms know this deep down in their souls. They don't even have to practice it, they're naturals. 

Men on the other hand (Dads for example), can be great mentors on how to do things as long as it involves the kids mostly watching demonstrations and learning. I don't believe those of us that were not trained at the university level should be allowed to teach some subjects, even to their own kids. We are way better at playing catch with a baseball or riding next to them on a bike than the skill of talking about things. We should lead good lives and try as we might to do the right things and hope the small ones are watching us men and learning by example. And also keep telling them to "Ask their Mother" for the final answer. Moms, you are the checks and balances of our children.

And we need to definitely listen to our wives, and wives need to not give up on us men. I truly believe it is through a woman's love, and it starts with a mother's love, that men mentally leave their boyhood behind to become a man. And the same mothers love shapes the daughters into the soul of humankind which we men seem incapable of properly understanding.

How else can wars be explained?