today

Weekends are usually difficult and today was unusually testing. I wrote in the previous post that it doesn't bother me anymore to talk about that subject matter, but the way I felt at certain points today maybe gives the lie to that assertion, because at those certain points I felt exasperated and angry to a degree quite unwarranted by what was actually happening in the here and now.

It's partly an emotional hangover or afterimage from thinking about those events in the mode of telling about them, and it's partly something maybe a little harder to convey - I think of it as taking the olympian perspective. I mean adopting a position for viewing one's own life that is miles and miles above the action - oversight, insight, omniscience, and detachment. It's how I think about things that are over and done with - it's how I turn them over in my mind, like a rubik's cube, turning them this way and that, pulling them apart and putting them back together again.



There is joy in this perspective in that it so readily reveals the full, rich, ripe, sustaining absurdity in the little things and the big events of everyday life. So it's not all bad. But when you take up that position for thinking about the past, you will find yourself looking at the present through the same lens and with the same intense and fairly inhuman scrutiny. Show me the person, marooned at a crossroads in her life or not, doesn't matter, who can look at her present self in that way and not find it a provoking, humbling, testing experience.



So I was tested; by aspects of my broader situation that I am still not ready to begin describing and also by a string of much more incidental things. I think however that I can say I acquitted myself today in exactly the manner I would hope to. I did not lose my rag at anyone, I didn't cry or flee or throw myself on anyone's mercy. I did allow myself to feel the sadness, the anger, the frustration, the disappointment, the loneliness, especially when the thing I was feeling bad about had been caused by someone other than me.



I did interleave those currents of feeling with reflection on the probable reasons why I was finding myself taking things particularly hard today, and on how soon those reasons will dissipate and pass and be replaced by better atmospheres, and this led naturally and easily enough to the insertion of moments of simple, basic self-care throughout the day: breathe in, breathe out and feel the inner tension leaving the body; drink another glass of water; sit quietly for a few minutes, you don't have to rush; do something small and nice for yourself now and later.