Back from the Dead...Sort of.

So, after many years of atrophy, my brain is back in creative mode. I suppose studying history and writing mind-numbing academic papers did that to me. Thankfully those cobwebs have been swept clean. I would love to get back into writing online, I have never had anyone read my musings, but I have the original thought here and there. I am not a fan of putting my feelings out there, but with the way that the world is these days, I realize people anymore have little to no anonymity. I am slowly becoming accustomed to living my life in a world where any stupid thing I say lives somewhere in the ether that is the internet. Or as GW once said, “the internets,”…”you know…the Google.” I am not entirely certain what motivated me to get back into writing but I keep a journal regularly. Mostly I rage about how discontented I have become with the state of my own personal style of organization and housekeeping ability (I hate vacuuming and I have 2 of the furriest mutts this side of the Cape Fear River), about the degradation of humanity, about feeling lonely, wishing I could worry less, you know, the usual. No worries, I don’t aim to trouble anyone with that here. Keeping that nonsense in the journal. I am reading a book by Ernest Becker called The Denial of Death. He wrote, “…the fear of death is a universal that unites data from several disciplines of the human sciences, and makes wonderfully clear and intelligible human actions that we have buried under mountains of fact, and obscured with endless back-and-forth arguments about the ‘true’ human motives.” (Becker, xvii-xviii). So I suppose Becker might say that my fear of death drives my urge to write about my existence. It is a way of setting down my own personal history so that when I am gone; there will be some sort of trail, that I left my mark in some fashion. That is probably a simple way of saying it. But part of me sees a lot of good in the world. I cannot help but be positive when I know plenty of people who do great things. On the other hand, I see violence and hate and my faith in humanity burns out. Life is so fleeting; I don’t understand why some people spend their time being hateful. It is such a waste. But being human, I have those same urges that burble up from time to time. The seven deadly sins. In short order, these are: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. I feel them all, sometimes all at once. And raw, human emotion is ugly. But something inside me is driven to try to shake those feelings, to tear them apart, deconstruct them, understand them, light them on fire, and let them go. That is what draws me to examining the life of the mind. I approach most everything with humor, I try to be open, I try not to judge. But of course sometimes I am humorless, closed minded and guarded, and I do judge. I had plenty of cringe worthy moments over the course of my life, and I stopped counting at, oh, let’s just say a billion. Empathy is one human emotion for which I am thankful. I cannot count the number of times I found myself in situations where I knew what the other person was feeling. More often than not, when at a pub, a sojourn to the ladies room almost always ends up with someone in tears—if you are there after the witching hour. I have helped a lovely lady clean herself up to go face her pain out on the dance floor with being no more than a perfect stranger. No matter how many tests you take to hammer out what your personality might be, for example the Myers Briggs, it is very much like a crap shoot. You wake up in a crap mood and you take the test and you are an introvert. You wake up and your mood dictates that your flatulence has the consistency of rainbows, you are an extrovert. At any rate, tests are useless; they measure nothing more than one’s ability to take a test. So, perhaps my desire to write once more is to somehow resurrect my own sense of self and to examine what the good life lived looks like. And along the way, perhaps, soliciting some comments from my inner circle, many of whom live inside their heads as much as I do. I just wish that in our modern culture it is okay to make mistakes; it is okay to feel vulnerable. In the culture in which I live, a military community, the stakes are very high. “Suck it up” is a mantra. I would love to soften my interpretation of the world in which I live. Let my flatulence smell of rainbows!! I am not a service member, I am a civilian. The longer I live and move around all of these war makers, I realize I am a pacifist. I am not an activist, a big difference, though I might be moved to activism in the right scenario. I am a staunch patriot. I am only a pacifist because I have seen what war can do to people. What it does to their soul. How it completely strips people of humanity. But I also know people who have no scars, no wounds of war, and have the easiest time compartmentalizing and sleep peacefully at night. My husband is one of them. I often observe him like he is an animal in a zoo, I study him closely. I know he saw some horrible things, has emotions about what he has done as a soldier in a time of war. It is almost like there are 2 people living inside of him—the one that goes to work and puts on the war face, eats razor blades for breakfast, and the one that comes home and snuggles with the dogs and uses baby voices to call them, and later asks me for a kiss and to be tucked in. But, for me, it is a challenge to try to understand how people’s circuitry is wired in their wee noggins. How can 2 people have the same experience, see and smell the same things in a traumatic experience, but have such an opposite account of that experience? I guess that is what I am driving at with the big blog exercise is to put my Freudian Id out there. I used to think I was alone. In the digital age when people can connect, I feel so much more normal! It was like Eureka! I am not the only freak out there! I want to voice my fears, what makes me feel so abnormal, so as to exorcise those feelings, to let them go. So…back to death. I think life is a series of deaths and rebirths—the death of a dream (failure); the death of a parent, spouse, loved one (grief); and ultimately rebirth. Even the littlest thing can bring about rebirth, and hence, I am most intrigued by people who are resilient. It sounds great on paper, but I am not sure I am one of the lucky few. One of my favorite characters in the Winnie the Pooh series was Eeorye. I always thought he was the wisest of the characters. He talked about how the other animals in the 100 Acre Wood had, “no brain at all, some of them…only grey fluff that’s blown into their heads by mistake.” Eeorye was downright Yoda-esque. Most people favored Pooh, for obvious reasons, mostly because when you are a kid you love saying Pooh. I am a grown up and I love saying Pooh. I identified with Piglet to be sure, he was such a Simpleton, though. Tigger was on drugs. Had ADD for sure. Anyhow, my point with the Eeorye analogy is that we all need someone like that in our life, we all need someone like Tigger, Pooh, Piglet. They all balance one another out. Eeorye lived in a state of constant grief. Without his other friends to help pull him out of morass, he probably would have stabbed himself with a thistle. My faith in humanity remains robust. But I am determined to figure out, at least on some small level, how and why people think. Most often, I return to death, the avoidance of it (plastic surgery), the celebration of it (war). We almost always want to be the most perfect version of ourselves. But I strive to live in the ugly as well. The moments of despair, insecurity, and humility are just as informative as those that enliven and uplift us. I will leave you with Ernest Becker on the topic, “In times such as ours there is a great pressure to come up with concepts that help men understand their dilemma; there is an urge toward vital ideas, toward a simplification of needless intellectual complexity. Sometimes this makes for big lies that resolve tensions and make it easy for action to move forward with just the rationalizations that people need. But it also makes for the slow disengagement of truths that help men get a grip on what is happening to them, that tell them where the problems really are.” (Becker, 1).