2001-06-04 - 8:00 p.m.
Issues, issues, and more issues ....
Sometimes I regret being cognizant of my surroundings. Ah, to be a member of the herd would be welcome at times, locking myself into the absence of self-awareness. I had a college philosophy professor tell me once that the self-examination of philosophy, when done right, was "a little painful" ... and I had no concept of how true that could be.
Today, I got the chance to catch up on reading the posts of my friends, who I like because they, too, are self-aware. Sometimes I think it's great to be able to vicariously experience small victories like the completion of a long-term garb project or the conclusion of studies for a term (or forever!). Then other times I am acutely aware of how closely related we all can be in our experiences. Reading about the end of a friend's marriage saddens me and also serves to remind me of my own two failed marriages. How does that work, a "failed" marriage? Better yet, why am I not like one of the mindless herd, able to simply forget such significant emotional experiences and move on? When I was much younger, I held the ideal of lifetime marriage to a single partner, swearing that I wouldn't be like my parents, who divorced when I was an infant. I have to admit that the biggest lesson of my first divorce was one of humanizing my parents ... not of them becoming more 'human' to me; rather, I realized that I am as 'human' as they are. And I really can't say a whole lot here about what I learned from the second one due to fear of boring the shit out of you. If you really want to know, ask me sometime when you have a month or two to waste. I personally think the Indigo Girls were on to something with Galileo:
"if we wait for the time
till all souls get it right
then at least i know there'll be no nuclear annihilation
in my lifetime, i'm still not right"
I suppose, at the end of the day, I wouldn't really trade my self-awareness for a little more peace. I guess if that were the case, then I'd be doomed to repeat the same mistakes, over and over and over .....
And, thankfully, I've got great friends to lean into for support.
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