New Year's Resolutions

On the eve of 2007, I think it's fitting to reflect on the past year and make some predictions or set some goals for the year to come.

Reflection #1: Fear is not a reason to fail to act. I broke up with two different men this past year, earned a master's degree, and confronted some more demons insofar as to why I am the way I am. None of it broke me. Some of it sucked, but it's all necessary, and fear of consequences or fallout is no justifiable reason to avoid doing what I must do. People can get mad... and they can get over it.

Reflection #2: I have finally learned that I can accept myself with my flaws. I might never find this self-acceptance to be easy, but I can in fact do it, if I am mindful. I have realized finally that being quieter, being thinner, being prettier, or being any other way different from how I am as I sit here isn't necessary for me to be worthy of acceptance or worthy of love. I already am worthy. I always have been.

Goal #1: Save a dollar a day until the end of November 2007.

Goal #2: Travel on an airplane at least three times in 2007.

Goal #3: New windows!

Goal #4: Get my weight down to 132 pounds... and weighing myself on a scale to prove it!

Prediction #1: I will change jobs in 2007.

Prediction #2: K will remarry in 2007.

Prediction #3: I'll gain another nephew or niece in 2007.

Prediction #4: I'll fall in love with someone -- or someone will fall in love with me -- in 2007, but not at the same time, and not together.

I got home today from a marvelous holiday trip to Chicago, and I'm just so grateful to be home again in my house. I'm here with my happy pets in my happy own space.

Morality

I was just reading on bible.com, and I clicked a link about sex before marriage. It said all the things someone might expect from a religious site, about fornication and failing to trust God by abstaining until marriage.

I am conflicted about this.

In the most general of perspectives, I agree wholeheartedly that abstinence from sex outside marriage is definitely the way to go. Abstinence removes the chances of disease, unplanned pregnancy, and emotional baggage. It lets us preserve our bodies and our hearts for something worthwhile enough in which to invest them. I don't believe in living together as a "trial run" for marriage; you're committed or you're not, and if you're committed, then get married and live together. That half and half, with one foot in, merging all your finances and practical lifestyles without some kind of social, emotional, and spiritual protection is no way to lay a foundation for the future.

On the other hand, I understand how the sex drive is almost like being hungry. Sometimes, for some people, sex can be an end in itself, not a communion deepening the bond between a husband and wife, but a physical behavior reasserting our ability to feel physically, verifying our humanity, especially when the people know and like one another, have reached the ages of consent (both legal and practical), understand the emotional ramifications if any, and take all appropriate precautions to eliminate the chances of disease and pregnancy. That being said, I don't excuse those who use one another as mere instruments. I don't excuse casual sex or predatory people of both sexes. I don't excuse those with torrid pasts who'd never dream of marrying someone without "trying him/her out" to ensure physical compatibility, now that they know better. Frankly, actually, I don't excuse any of it, or myself, but I do understand it. Their eyes are not on the love, their eyes are on the hunger.

So, yes, I agree the generally speaking, sex outside of marriage is unwise. It's like living together and merging assets without practical protection. If you're going to merge bodies, which are so much more vulnerable than assets, then why not afford yourself that same social, emotional, and spiritual protection from marriage? However, what two grown, single, independent, financially responsible adults choose to do in their own homes with the shades drawn lies, literally and figuratively, between the two of them. People's sex lives are their own business, unless they as for my opinion or advice, or unless somehow, their behavior impinges upon my own liberties (like, I can ask that they not sleep together in my house, that they not make me an audience for their performance, or that they eschew elaboration on said subject before my hypothetical young children or any actual young children in the vicinity, say).

However, if they're not grown, not single, not independent, and not financially responsible, then heck yes, I have a lot more to say about it. Their behavior can create consequences beyond them, and that is selfish in the extreme.

I've got the past I have, and as I sit here, I don't regret any of it, but I do think I'd do things differently if I could go back. Some of it I'd eliminate, and some of it I'd change... and some of it I'd leave exactly the same.

I believe that God wants each of us to become the people he meant for us to be. We're all a combination of gifts and talents that can grow to extraordinary fruition if we ally ourselves to our values and focus on what's important for a well-lived life. Wallowing in any excessive behaviors... gluttony, fornication, and the other five deadly sins... clouds our vision and prevents us from realizing our potential. Addictions serve to sever our ability to access our gifts... and having sex for the sake of having sex -- and risking a bunch of spiritual and practical difficult consequences -- thus seems kind of pointless at best and counterproductive at worst. Too bad most of us can realize this with our minds when the hardware governing our sex drives has a manual override button.

Christmas Eve

I'm sitting on my couch watching Wedding Crashers by myself on Christmas Eve, and I find myself perfectly happy to do so.

Earlier today, I watched a Tivoed episode of 20/20 in which Barbara Walters focused on Heaven. She interviewed several people of various faiths, including athiests, and I find the coincidence of that particular program showing at this particular time rather, well, coincidental, considering my religous ruminations lately.

One thing the show did mention is a "belief gene," or something that scientists have discovered in human biochemistry that leads to a propensity to believe. The people with the gene are, by their nature, more open to the spiritual and comfortable with the unexplainable than others.

Anyway, to reprise ideas of Heaven, I can't help remembering something from my latest favorite book, Eat, Pray, Love. Liz, the narrator, was discussing Heaven with the Balinese medicine man whom she had befriended. He said something about Heaven and Hell being the same. One goes up, through happiness and joy, and the other goes down, through darkness and suffering, but at the end, they arrive at the same thing: love. Interesting idea, isn't it? I feel convinced that there is more to life than we can understand, and I definitely get the yin-yang of love, but unlike Liz's medicine man, the preachers in the 20/20 episode or even the Dalai Lama (whom Walters interviewed as well), I still feel no confidence making assertions of the nature of life beyond this obvious one.

Really Recent Rumination

Time for a bit of a breather in my religous exploration to talk about friends.

Is there an emotional point where people in all their manifestations become exhausting? If there is such a point, then perhaps I've found it. Even those whom I love -- and have loved for a long time -- are difficult to bear. No, more precisely, relationships in all their manifestations and incarnations are becoming an irritatant if not outright a source of anxiety. Lately, they seem to exact an emotional cost beyond that which I feel the fortitiude to bear.

There are myriad possible explanations... the stress of the holiday season... changes people are undergoing personally and professionally... the distance from my family... but none of them are the reason. Those reasons are eternal, like paying taxes or the sun. Examining this time in my life, what's different, truly different?

I am alone, literally and figuratively.

I've spent the last three years coming to terms that none of us really can count on what it is that we have from others. Marriages end, or people die, move, or separate... things change. I have so many friends who spend this season with their families... some may think that this season is time for them to enjoy the spoils of their efforts for family all year long... well, maybe I was some kind of inadvertent architect of my divorce, and I definitely pulled the plug in relationships since then; thus, I'm alone. I've built nothing for this feather-nesting time, they may think, so I should "enjoy" it, my aloneness while they wrap themselves in the comforting quilt of family. I made this bed, after all, and I must lie in it alone.

But rather than envy their families and their collaborative holidays, rather than wishing I had one of my own, or at the very least a snowstorm of invitations because "Your'e just like family to us," I can't help but realize, beyond their traditions and exclusions during this holiday as they may apply, they are alone, too. All of us are. While my aloneness may be more literal this Christmas, the truth is that none of us are forever for any of the rest of us. This may be my season to go it alone. Someday, some Christmas, they may find themselves in different circumstances than they find for themselves this year... circumstances which might serve to build within them less of an all-encompassing yet limiting celebration of the life of family and one that embraces all whom they love, and all for whom they are grateful, all year long.

My enlightment of the true isolation of our humanity does connect to God, who cannot let us down. People are fallible, but God is not. God is all around, and even in our moments of aloneness, he connects each of us to him and one another. Looking for people to serve the needs within our souls is a fallacious approach to fulfillment; in our own limitations, biases, proclivities, and exclusions, we are far from open-hearted and selfless enough to bear eternally the needs of our fellow men and women.

My failure during this time of Christmas is my neglect to forgive myself and my friends for our collective humanity. I need to forgive myself for taking personally the things they do that bother me, whether they've done them intentionally or unintentionally. I need to communicate my feelings instead of using my generally overdeveloped skill of cutting people off when they fall too far short of my expectations. I need to go beyond the fallibility of our collective humanity to appreciate the essential joy that my loved ones bring to my life.

Maybe, that way, I can bear our relationships during this difficult and anxiety-provoking holiday time.

It's a scary position to feel that relationships, all of them, are becoming more trouble than I want to make for them.

Salve Salvation

So. Salvation.

Ugh. Before I go further, I feel like I need to make a disclaimer here as I discuss the foundation of what I actually find myself believing in the moment and the answers for which I'm searching. I respect people who have religious convictions. It's a lovely idea that people can accept their faith as response or justification for the way things are and ought to be. That's the beautiful thing about faith. Many have the fortitude to do this; their faith sustains them, even giving them the grace to espouse scripture when it falls alongside logic, science, or "proof" of the divine.

But when people say they "practice" a religion, it's probably because religion, like medicine or law, needs constant rehearsal to maintain focus, integrity, and facility. Finding God and keeping him close is no easy thing, not when facets of the mainstream society, some parts of the scientific community, and alleged "free thinkers" are vocal and public in their perspectives.

With that being said... there's a gulf between what I really and truly believe and what I'd like to be able to believe. That's where these essays are coming from. So... again... salvation. Do I believe in Heaven? If not, then what? As far as Heaven goes, I don't believe in it, not exactly. The bible discusses Heaven and assures the faithful that their faith will bring eternal salvation, but I can undersatnd that idea as a metaphor. The question begs, then, a metaphor for what?

I don't know.

Transformation is perhaps the miracle after death that nobody understands. Science can explain what happens to our bodies after we die, but our "fingerprint of God," that unique part that is God in each of us, that's not body-dependent. I know what the bible says about death and resurrection, but I don't believe in literal interpretations of them. The bible does assure the faithful that something does occur with our souls. That's a consideration. But I don't think "eternal life" is anything akin to our mortal lives now. Just as we were unaware of this reality before birth, so I think we are unaware of it after death. Just what happens? I think... nothing, at least nothing that we recognize or can possibly understand. The divine part of us is not attached to this temporal part of us, not even in a way cognizant of it. In death, it becomes an entity wholly separated, wholly apart. But what happens to it is anybody's guess. What the bible means by it is anybody's guess, too. I admire the religious in their face-value acceptance of scripture, but I think there's more to it than the face. The words are ideas; the words are not literal.

What about those death dreams of bright lights and seeing loved ones that the near-death see? Dreams... vivid, real, potent dreams borne of fear and with the convictions that those who dream with lively reality seem to forget are not real for moments upon awakening. I suppose that dreams could conduct the divine, but I'm not one who's learned to believe such things.

Religious Doctrine

I've been thinking so consumingly about religion lately, I feel compelled to somehow state my faith, my real faith, the faith that exists inside me in all its fallible details.

I find that I do believe in God, that God is. In fact. Like a blanket, God is all around, over everything. Defining God beyond that is difficult for me. I see patterns in our world. I see the sameness between and among what's perceptible on our earth, and I see the minute differences that render everything yet different. It's a miracle, and it's what convinces me of the existence of the divine. Even if there are scientific justifications and explanations for everything, there is still something not explainable about it, and that part is God. Two children can have the exact same experience... loved the same, taught the same, given the same opportunities and lessons and advantages, and while one might achieve competence on a musical instrument, for example, the other might be able to make it sing, to weep, to laugh, and to move hundreds of people to tears. That artistry, that instinct, that genius, that is not explainable. The unique spirits of individuals, that is not explainable. That is the fingerprint of the divine on each of us.

Religions strive to explain or introduce God, and while I have found enormous comfort in the moments I've been able to quell my doubts and simply accept a religion's perspective on God, most moments I cannot escape that religious texts spring from people, all of whom are fully engaged in the frailty of human experience. Instinctively, I resist worshipping religious text and religious tradition. Both come from man.

However, I do not believe that religious texts exist to "prove" religion, they are a manifesto on the right way to live. They are instruction manuals on living properly and rightly, and there are right ways to live, I believe. But the signficance of such instruction is personal. What I mean by that is that by accepting the Bible as my instruction manual, I must accept it prioritally. I'm not even speaking of moral relativism, here. As I said, I do believe that right and wrong ways to live, and the most important commandment is for me to focus my whole heart and soul on God; I must also live right by loving others, by honoring marriage vows, by satisfying myself with what I have, and honoring the rest of the commandments. Doing so makes it impossible to look at everyone else around me and exclaim, "But she isn't doing the right thing!" If a friend invites me to offer input, or if someone is clearly in physical or moral peril, then I can try out of my love and influence to support that person in a time of crisis, but mindful of living well to me means starting with myself.

Then there is the Jesus thing. I need to do more research to satisfy some questions I still have in regard to Jesus. Right now, I don't feel comfortable making a conclusive declarative statement about Jesus and where I believe he fits into the big religion picture. What I can say now is that I do believe he existed. I believe he was a real person.

I suppose that many faithful Christians follow doctrine out of a love of God and a desire to fulfill the birthright of salvation. Perhaps some perceive a fear of hell. Some behave with a devotion to Jesus that seems cult-like and arguably disturbing. Frenetic. For them, it's as though Jesus is an imaginary friend, but in addition to being available for them whenever they'd like, he comes along with an entire book that tells them just what to do, how to live, and what's good and bad, and it guarantees that if they follow the rules, they can take comfort that they're "right," and they will win the prize of eternal life. Some wear their rightness like a badge... like bus patrols from elementary school. The real question to me is what motivates people to accept Jesus and behave that way? For salvation to have any value to someone, that person must first believe in it. Maybe that's the "real" real question. What about salvation?

For now, I've gone as far with this essay as I can. I will think about salvation... and read up on Jesus... and come back another time with more.

Holidays Hale and Hearty

As the holidays approach, I see a lot of hysteria. My friends at the gym twitter like birds about gifts for their ungrateful children or travel plans, and the people at work compare schedules, days off, and planned menus, the drugery of in-laws, or surprises in store. The malls are clogged, and even the internet shopping sites are backlogged. Everyone scuttles around, busy with visions of something or other, and nobody seems really to think about the potential for the holiday season for loving each other.

I know that Christmas is supposed to celebrate the birth of Jesus, but Jesus wasn't even born in December; Christians celebrate this time of year as his birth as it overlapped the solstice festival from the pagan religions that preceded Christianity. So as not to be pagan, Christians attributed Christ's birthday to this time of year. But when I'm talking about "the holiday season," I'm thinking less of the Christian holiday elements and more about the generosity and inclusiveness of the holiday season.

Gifts used to be my primary focus of the holiday, with family and friends rounding out the experience. From my parents and then a succession of boyfriends and my husband, I was used to getting a fair booty of stuff. I anticipated it well into adulthood with a shamless and undiluted glee reminiscent of a child. It was terrific. I loved books, games, pretty clothes, and jewelry in some abundance. It made the time special, to wear something new, spend time on something new, and then to see the people in my life who mattered, sharing with them my new sparkle plenty. It was exciting! I have some good memories there.

But as I sit here now, however, I can't help but think of how none of the stuff really matters. I live alone and conduct my life alone, what matters isn't the stuff I had then, or even what I've lost in people and relationships. What really and truly matters, as I sit here now, is the love I have for people who matter to me. I can give them love in abundance. Maybe they won't last as a part of my life, just like the games and books have passed through my life over time. But right now, as I sit here, I love, and nothing I shop for and then wrap can compete with that. Relationships may be only temporary, as we're all ultimately divided by distance, time, or death; though only the intangible is permanent, whether we call it God or some other form of the divine, we can, even temporarily, love wholeheartedly, for as long as the people we love are part of our lives.

Do those grousing people at the gym or the crankly coworkers remember to love well?

My friend D in Chicago invited me to spend the holiday with his family, and that invitation meant a great deal. It's loving well. Someone outside of my family (whom I adore, but who are sort of obligated to include me) actually threw open a door during this sacrosant time of year and said, "Please come, and welcome... we want you to be a part of our celebration." So I booked at ticket, and I'm terribly excited. It's somewhat unfortunate that I don't fit easily and recognizably into a family system of celebration at this time of my life, as I am not a child, nor am I a spouse or a parent. But I remain a loving person, and D and his family in their openheartedness reached out to me because of their consideration and celebration of me as a loving person; I am all too happy to reach back.

My running friend at the gym wants to buy me a gift for the holiday, which is touching, but when she asked what I wanted, I was gratified to realize, I had no answer for her. I have enough, and not to want is a freedom I haven't ever experienced before.

Presents don't matter after all. Love matters.

Short Term Goals

It's been a tumultuous few weeks, where I've broken free (once and for all, no matter what, for both our sakes) from TCMT, and now I've decided to address a few short-term objectives.

First, some counseling; my yearly deductible starts over in 2007, but I'm switching insurance in March, and as the deductible might re-start over then, anyway. Even, do my issues require a counselor? Probably not. But don't think it'd hurt, either. So, March, then. We shall see.

Also, there's learning to meditate. Some websites have "lessons" on meditation to practice in the coming weeks. Creating stillness in my mind, and then focusing my energies rather than letting them react to circumstance, would be an excellent program in self-discipline. I can begin this at once, and I am looking forward to it.

Another goal I have is to find a unitarian church nearby to begin attending services on the weekends. Practicing Catholicism isn't the answer right now, with its rigidity, cereminiousness, and insular approach.

Of course, I'll continue working out and sharing a social life with those already part of my circle. Now isn't the time for building new relationships. From the embarrassment and regrets I'm facing from TCMT, I see that the best alternative right now is reinforcing myself -- really reinforcing myself in my focus, dedication, and priorities, so that, someday, I really do have something to offer the world, myself, and new relationships of all kinds.