It was weird yesterday to purposefully choose not to write a blog entry yesterday. I sat there looking at my computer like, “I’m supposed to write an entry right now.”
😶
And I just sort of… didn’t, obviously, but it was so strange to just not do it.
And then today, I felt the pull exactly like I have in the past. Today, when it started coming time to write my post, I was like, meh, I don’t really want to. And since I didn’t yesterday, it would have been easy to not write an entry again today.
And that’s how I quickly lose the habit and then years of my life get lost in a blur with no record at all.
That happened the most recent time shortly after moving to Arkansas after years and years of daily journal writing. One of my 12-step sponsors wanted me to follow a particular schedule, and for some reason it cut out daily journal writing. I don’t remember why, but that supposedly brief hiatus lasted years.
I don’t want to slide back into that. I want a record to be able to go back to, even when I don’t go back and read it, even when the life I document is rather boring/mundane/predictable–with the occasional interesting patch (Costa Rica, I’m looking at you here).
But here we are, having purposefully skipped a day but being back at it. So… I guess I’ll start with the most important. Emotionally, I’m not great by any means, but I’m a good bit better than I was when I was contemplating suicide.
Yesterday was better than today, but today is still far better than… what was it… Sunday? Monday? I don’t remember the day things were really really bad.
Yesterday, I continued one experiment and had a pretty decent day. The experiment was putting my LDS garment on (Google that if you’re not sure what the LDS garment is). I hadn’t worn the garment in… I don’t even know how long. A long time, but I had this weird feeling to put it on, a feeling that was quite out of the blue and unexpected, but I figured, “I’m experimenting, so let’s experiment.”
I put it on, and interestingly enough, yesterday was significantly better than the days prior. I probably should have written about yesterday to keep the memory clearer as to exactly what I was feeling, but I didn’t, so here we are with less than stellar recall. Was the change in feeling and emotion coincidence? Was it evidence of greater being out there aware of me?
Got me…
After showering last night, I removed the garment, as per the experiment, and chose not to wear it the rest of the night or the day today. Interestingly, and I have no idea where this came from, my conscience, which has been pretty much numb to the things that I do that are against my own values suddenly woke up yesterday/last night. My pornography use has been frequent, my mouth has been awful (sailor speak has been very frequent–the most common reaction to even the slightest thing going sideways), but acting out of character to my own values hasn’t… felt bad. I’ve just been numb, dismissive, angry, rebellious, etc.
Suddenly, last night before bed with a dip into porn, there was my conscience alive and well. Boom. Out of the blue. I felt it when I woke up this morning, pricked/stung by my own actions instead of numb. Stung because it’s not what I want, not what the person I want to be would do–view porn, talk like the proverbial sailor, etc.
Why did my conscience come back out of the blue with no warning? Was it having chosen to follow that little “put your garment back on” feeling that woke up… me? Or was it a coincidence? A feeling brought on by… and I’m scrambling a little bit to find something else as an alternative (feel free to suggest alternatives).
I honestly don’t know. But I left the garment off all day today, and I’ve slipped a little bit back toward heavier feelings, feeling more the weight of all the things I’ve got going on in my life.
So… I don’t know. We’ll see. I’m open to whatever truth is. Good science is repeatable. So… I’ll test stuff again and again and see, no preconceived anything.
At the very moment, I’m feeling heavier because I there’s so much I want to do, but I’m somewhat paralyzed by the mountain that I feel on top of me, so I’m sliding back deeper into escape mode (staring at screens to avoid the pain and strain of digging out and trying to move forward). Is that sliding back because I took the garment off, and there’s something to all that? A god trying to point me to truth? Or is it all just nonsense, coincidence? We’ll see.
But I’m not doing so well at the moment, that heavy weight pressing on my chest, making it hard to move even though I want to so badly. I just… can’t, not in the ways I want to.
As for yesterday, I can’t remember what all I did. I didn’t work on fixing cars. I did answer the phone a few times, I think, but I didn’t schedule anything. I helped my mom get some wood chips for the garden, to keep the weeds from growing around the veggies. We drove up to the upper pasture area to check out one of the tractor implements we are trying to get fixed, and I blew out my tire accidentally driving over the part of the implement (the long steadying frame). I couldn’t see it in the grass. Still, it’s shocking that it popped the tire. Had to have been the absolute perfect angle, like one-in-a-thousand, kind of thing because it was all blunt parts with one little part having barely any edge at all. Yet… boom. It blew up all at once.
So… I drove the truck back to our house on the flat, across gravel road and through the back woods, but I made it (wasn’t in the mood to walk back to the house, drive my van up, and change the tire in the tick field.
Nope.
So I changed the tire, helped my mom transfer dirt to different boxes, and… gosh, I don’t remember much more of the day.
Today… let’s see. Today I slept in a good bit. I realized that I took my blown engine to the scrap metal place, which meant if I got an engine from a place that required a core, I’d be out an extra probably $500-750. 😬 So I drove over to the scrap metal place and asked if there was any way I could go back and un salvage my engine parts.
At first they said no, but then one guy feeling bad for me said that if I could bring more metal, and I could find my metal parts, then we could exchange the metals, since I’d already done all the transactions. So… I’ll do that tomorrow. I’ll try and bring enough metal to cover the engine parts, and we’ll go from there. Don’t know how hard that’ll be, as some of it was aluminum. Might be a lost cause. I just realized that aluminum part just now. 😬
I might be hosed.
😕
I guess that limits my engine options to only used ones from salvage yards or private individuals, as it’s probably very unlikely I’ll find the engine heads.
Whoops. Expensive mistake.
I’ll still give it a whirl. We’ll see.
Today… what else… oh, I drove way out into the middle of Beaver Lake area to look at what a dumpster full of roofing shingles looks like after they’ve been torn off a house. I’m curious to see how usable the old shingles are for weed barriers, like under the paver stones in the garden and whatnot… areas where we don’t want weeds growing but nor are we worried about cutting off the water supply to other plants (so… garden walkways and around the mailboxes and fence lines, etc.). After taking a look, honestly, I think I’m just going to need to get a load of them, dump them out, and just see what I have.
Another experiment.
But I’m all about reducing the yard/garden maintenance, and it’d be better to recycle the shingles to some useful purpose instead of dumping them in the landfill (we don’t have a shingle recycler nearby).
So… I’m contemplating that. We’ll see how it goes. Might be good, might not be.
What else… uh… the power went out, and it’s… been really hot over here, and being out in the forest, the humidity is a lot higher than in town (at least it feels that way to me), so it’s sticky right away, starting to sweat within a handful of seconds, and very wet within minutes of working even moderately hard (like… really wet).
My poor sweaty genes. Man, I could fill a bucket an hour with how much I sweat. It’s nuts. I do miss dry heat quite a bit. Wish the west weren’t so blasted hot/cold/expensive/dry. Can’t seem to have my cake and eat it too. 🙃 There are a few places that kind of fit the bill, but principally, I’m not on the same page with the politics of those places, being most closely identified as a libertarian if I had to pick a party (which I don’t like being affiliated one bit to any party).
Anyway, that leads fairly cleanly…
Oh! One other thing I did yesterday, I spent a couple hours playing in the creek. 😊 That also could have a good deal to do with how I felt yesterday, spending most of my day away from the escaping media screens in my room, which are easy conduits to get me back to feeling paralyzed.
But yeah, played in the creek for a couple of hours, spending most of the time creating an access to the creek that Mindy would be comfortable with. She’d joined me at the creek’s edge a couple times, lapping up some water, but when I invited her into the water, she wouldn’t come, though I felt like I could see her wanting to (she’s a very fearful dog, afraid of pretty much everything), but the water right next to the bank was the deepest and fastest of the whole creek in that area (probably only like 8 inches deep, but she was still having none of that). So I built her a little pathway to of really big flattish rocks that was maybe a couple feet wide and maybe 8 or 10 feet long, filling in the cracks between the rocks with smaller rocks, and putting other rocks under the slabs all around to make them stable enough for me to walk on without them moving.
After walking the path myself, and then helping my mom down the steep bank and onto the slab, Mindy followed, and after a bit of hesitation, she really started getting into it, running around here and there, taking the lead, exploring, etc. That was super cool. Still have to watch out for her because we’ve got lots of venomous snakes out here (copperheads, cotton mouths, coral snakes, and two or three different rattle snakes [though I’ve never seen a single one for sure in the six-plus years I’ve been here. I might have seen a copperhead once, but it was under leaves and slithered away quickly, so who knows.]).
Anyway, had to keep an eye on her because of course she wants to sniff around the microcaves under/between rocks, and if there are snakes, that’s where they’re most likely to be.
Still, she seemed to have a great time enjoying her first exploration of a creek. I thought she might enjoy it after she’s taken a massive liking to playing in the hose nozzle jet stream. She attacks it and bites at it and plays with it and attacks it as you move it around, and she’ll sit there with it at full force pounding against her nose, and she absolutely loves it.
So… I thought she might enjoy the creek, and I think that’s a winner, too.
So that was another thing I did yesterday, and that love of playing in creeks goes back to my earliest memories in Connecticut, so… that’s can be a great mood lightener, I think?
Back to the “Anyway, that leads fairly cleanly…” into a lot of what’s on my mind. For the last 12 years, I’ve been spending nearly all of my effort preparing for a life I thought I was going to have. All the money I was saving, all the decisions I was making about where I was going to live, what I was going to do with my money, what exactly I was going to do and where… all of that was sort of… pending. I was just preparing for a future I expected. So I didn’t make those decisions. I’ve been a bit of a nomad with nowhere feeling like home because… I was waiting to make all those decisions with a companion.
Now here I find myself nowhere near the position I thought I was going to be in, and I’m by myself, and I’m 40 years old (at the moment, it’s 12:11 central time, which means it’s June 24th and my half birthday, so I’m halfway to 41 already), and without having pretty much any of what I’d planned for and hoped for having come to pass, and having lost enormous amounts of money and having lost countless opportunities over the last 6 years because I didn’t make good decisions when I found myself in the unexpected circumstances I found myself in, here I am not as well prepared at all as I should/could have been, and even with what I do have, which certainly isn’t nothing, I don’t even really know what I want because… it was never supposed to be me making those decisions alone. So I didn’t even think about them. I’ve spent so many years trying to build the best foundation I could for the family I wanted to have but i didn’t really think that much about doing what I wanted to do with my life and where I wanted to do it.
Well, to be fair, the first 6 or so years were more the hopeful preparation, and the last 6 or so years have mostly been a scared, desperate hope, preparing for a hoped-for future, but also just… mechanically moving forward on relatively unhappy autopilot, afraid it was all for nothing.
That’s I guess a long intro to saying, here I am at 40, finding myself without what I’d worked for, hoped for, and planned for, and now I’m alone and need to just choose what I want to do going forward. There’s no companion to talk mutual hopes and dreams and desires with. No one to compromise with. No shared goals to bring together and synergistically explode toward the future.
It’s just me.
What do I want most?
In everything!
There’s an internal battle, a strong one. Part of me wants to go out and change the world. I’m most passionate, most excited, most energetic when I’m motivating, teaching, serving–out there building and leading organizations that help people all over the world, meeting with leaders of organizations and cities, states, countries, etc. Part of me loves that and is both passionate and also terrified by it (with so much of the terror coming in concerns about how I’ll support myself and a family out doing that kind of work humanitarian work. Money is easy to make in commercial pursuits. A few ideas and a lot of really hard work. But providing for a family when you’re not selling anything? (service, good, etc). That’s… a bit scary to me. Part of me still desperately clings to the desire for security before I go out and do those things–a house paid off completely. A passive income that covers my/my family’s needs and at least a few of their wants, so I’m not dependent on asking for money in my humanitarian efforts in order to support my family.
At the same time, along with that part of me that wants to go out and give speeches and teach and motivate, and work side by side with people all over the world to make the world a better place, there’s a part of me that longs for the quiet of the countryside, a large-acre tract of land, with forest and hill and creek. A garden. Like a hobbit, the quiet country Shire, and good tilled earth. Working in the garden, taking care of the forests, playing in the creek, building that self-sufficient large-acre property. I’d even absolutely love a hobbit home. I’ve wanted something like that since I was a kid, before I’d even read about hobbits.
Anyway, I’m trying to figure out now what I want most, and can I get it? And… what would it all look like? And what would have to be sacrificed, if anything. Can I have my acreage in the woods and my hobbit hole and still go out and change the world like I want to? And if so, how? The money I have now certainly isn’t sufficient, not by a long shot in this economy and housing price structure. And if I use all my money now on the real estate aspect of the dream, what about the future humanitarian work?
Oh… it’s a hard one.
Can I find ways to provide for a family through the humanitarian efforts? Of course. But… it’s starting over–completely over. It’s scary.
But I’m afraid I’ll badly regret it if I don’t.
I already have so so many regrets, the biggest coming in the last 7-8 years. Absolutely huge regrets. How many more do I want? One life. And after it’s over, there might or might not be anything more.
Why is it so scary to let go of where I’m at and just go for it? Maybe it’s having seen so many things I put my whole heart in just… die.
But I’ve pretty much been successful at everything I’ve tried when it comes to business and business relationships. It’s never been hard to be successful in business for me. Why would I suddenly doubt myself in the humanitarian sphere?
I don’t know, but it’s super hard to just let go. The “sensible” part of me says wait. Get your foundation built further. Get more money. Be better prepared. Make sure you’ve already gotten to that place where you’ve got the property and house paid off and have that passive income that’s enough to support the family. Get there first.
But… I might never get there. Who knows what’s waiting on the horizon. I could have a jack/stand fail any day and be crushed by a car (I have a jack that’s starting to lose it’s ability to stay up, sometimes sagging down instead of maintaining position). Anything can happen. I could be in a car wreck. I could make a million dollars and have a huge medical issue and lose everything.
Where’s the balance? Or do I say to heck with the balance. I tried being sensible, and I wasted my life trying to build a foundation for a life that never came and might not ever?
Sorry. I know y’all have read me describe the same internal battle over and over and over, and here I am still, clinging to this security blanket that is good money doing a job I don’t like.
(sigh)
Anyway, I think I’ve been writing for a while, so this is probably a long post. 🙃 …guess I’m making up for missing yesterday. 😎
Well, folks, looking at the time (12:45), I’d probably better wrap this up. I’m going to do a job or two tomorrow, I think, and we’ll see how the day goes.
One thought to ponder, in my mind’s eye, I look toward and see a future like we see in Star Trek, where the people of earth all get along, where we don’t pollute and destroy anymore, we take care of our planet, we care for one another, etc. We’re relatively united.
I’d like to find a name to describe that vision–a name I could give to an organization. I think that’s why, though he’s imperfect and is taking quite a beating in the press lately, I’ve loved what Elon Musk is doing–making it feel, at least to me, like that future could be closer than we had thought. He’s doing it on the technology side. I want to do it on the human side–find those awesome, huge, amazing goals that we as a human race can band together to work passionately toward.
It’s hard to keep up the hope and optimism. I feel like the media and our political leaders do so many things to stoke the fires of division. I feel like there’s so much group think hedging progress and masking our beautiful shared humanity behind differences in the application of principles–such as in the cases of abortion, guns, and other hot-button issues of the day. We’re good people, folks. Good people. But we’re taught to see our differences in the application of values as evil, awful, worthy of disdain, people to hate, to fight violently against–hearts filled with anger and vitriol.
The people who don’t want there to be guns aren’t wanting people to be unprotected. They want everyone to be safe. And the people who are advocating for the retention/expansion of gun rights aren’t wanting people to be unprotected. They want everyone to be safe.
(obviously, there are a few exceptions, as there are people who want to harm others, and they could fall into either camp [not that this is a duality, it’s not, but you take my meaning, I think]).
We want the same things. That’s beautiful. We agree on the most important priority: We want people to be safe!
Isn’t that wonderful?!?!
Isn’t that amazing?!?!
Isn’t that a beautiful expression of our shared humanity.
We simply disagree on the best avenue to arrive at the shared goal.
(sigh)
Sorry, tangent. It’s just so… sad that we fight in anger with one another when our hearts desire the same things…
Anyway, it’s 1 a.m. Time to call it a night. I’m… still trying to figure out how to let go–if that’s even the right thing to do.
What do I want most? Well, I don’t have what I wanted most, so now I have to dig deep and really feel through it all.
What do I want most?
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 