I have had some time away recently due to a work trip that took me to Bali, and it’s been three days back and i’m in a funky circadian flux. I slept from 2 til 9pm yesterday, and again from midnight til 3, and I spent the wee hours of this morning laying in the dark looking at pictures of tattoos, before marking myself with a sharpee an old bit of remembered scripture that I’ve always been quite taken with – two small chinese characters on the nook of each wrist: 弱,反. Weakness, and Opposition! The direction of Tao is opposition, the nature of Tao is weakness.
I have been thinking on my next phase of self-actualization, my favorite philosophical chew-toy, and I think about the people in my life that matter, and how much concern i give them vs myself, and it seems so much of my ability to really love others is contingent on my capacity for self-love. When I first met my wife I misrepresented myself through a tacit implication that i was okay with who i was, when in reality i was laser focused on all of the faults and strange peccadilloes of character that stood out to me like miscolored bumps on smooth skin, hating them and wishing them gone. And since I moved down to Florida to join her I’ve taken up an arduous but healing practice of facing down those avoided bits of my personality and accepting them, cringe-inducing as they may be, like taking a mirror to my own asshole and appreciating its functional utility (is that my head?!). Incidentally, I’m shrinking that part of me that is asshole-ish, or negative, and wanting to shit-talk each earnest and imperfect thing. the little demon that sprouted up as a defense-mechanism against the terrible sadness of isolation, modeled on my hard-talking ass-kicking father.
It’s been three years since i moved and my mental health has improved significantly, and though there’s still lots to mock and raise my nose to I’ve learned to be forgiving, and kind; I find myself leaning into the things that usually sent me running, and contextualizing behavior i would previously have found contemptible. All of it circles back to my own self-view, as lazy and goofy and time-wasting as I may be, I am pretty darn close to accepting the whole of me without the need to hide, or explain things away, to say without shame, that’s me. And it’s seems such a hackneyed self-help thing to be focused on but really it’s the thing i needed and maybe we all could use more of. to see ourselves clearly warts and all and love without needing conditions.
I’ve been on the stove for a while. And there is a transformative thing finally happening, right in time or spurred into being by my wife and i actively trying to make another human being, a selfish pursuit to be sure, but one that has emulsified all these seemingly disparate truths into a tasty little sauce. That I can be ugly and still beautiful, foolish but also wise, that I can dream without qualification. Weakness and opposition.
