Red Elephant

A Modern Way of Letting Go

Before webmail got huge, I found myself having to make some decisions. It was go through folder by folder to discover what was worth keeping or the grand gesture of deleting whole people, whole parts of my life. And as we all know, while I am a details guy, I am very fond of grand gestures.

There were acquaintances who didn't write much or well. There were online flirtations that had fizzled, or never really caught in the first place. Then came the old girlfriends. What to do. The theme lately has been closure. Letting go of old relationships, clearing out my life, rememberances, emails, letters, books, art that reminds me. There is always something there to remind me.

There is a difference in breaking up between letting go & pushing away. Sometimes you just let some people go, the stuff they gave you falls into disrepair, gets lost, disappears. There's the impulse to purge the person completely out of your life. I have a friend Who not only erased all of her email to the boy, but got into his email account [she had his password] and erased it all there, too. A total cleansing. Did she have the right? Doesn't matter, she had the access. The keys to his house, so to speak.

The committed girlfriends were the easiest. "Oh, she's getting married. Yes, better not to leave little flirty things around. Oh her, I still want her, but I have no doubt we'll never get back together. That one, oh, well, if she doesn't get married, she & the new boy will be together a long time. Good for them. No hard feelings. [Click]

Then there are the letters I keep. [Actually, I keep all my letters, I'm referring to the emails that are written like letters.] The ones from girls who were friends first, who I want to remember regardless of whether I have moved on, or if they have. These are the best written ones, the ones I can re-read later in life, whether I'm with someone or not and say to myself, "This is what I was like at that time. This is who I was."

I was talking with Jenn about her writing group -- how there's a woman & a priest who struck up a correspondence. [no, it's not a joke] It so happens that she is now divorced & he is thinking of leaving the priesthood. Their correspondence is intense, but ultimately they decide they have to stop. Or she decides, I'll have to ask Jenn. In any case, in the course of writing group, this woman thinks about publishing their letters, including his half. She's wondering if she's entitled to do that.

Slippery slope that. His words, but he sent them to her. I personally believe that once you speak or write a word, it takes on a life of it's own. You can ask people to respect your privacy, but ultimately the act of writing [or speaking] is an act of creating. People will do the words what they will. Kafka asked his friend & literary executor, Max Brod, to destroy his works after he died. Luckily for us, Max didn't. I can only wonder what Kafka thinks/would think of his legacy.

There's a word in Russian, razbliuto (ros-blee-OO-toe): the feeling a person retains for someone he or she once loved. That's what I think about, the things that remain after love, after lust, or at least after the relationship. Sometimes there are photographs, sometimes letters, and sometimes only memories.

Yoga and Advice

I've been away all weekend at an Anusara Yoga Workshop presented by Jamie Allison. It was an amazing experience, and has really given me some techniques and inspiration to deepen my practice. Many thanks to Jed and Sarah Moulton, my friends and instructors who told me about the workshop. I hope to eventually instruct at their studio here in Omaha.

On a purely technical note, I learned some techniques that will allow me to build strength in my shoulders so I can do more head-, shoulder- & handstands as well as the ever popular Urdhva Dhanurasana.

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This just in, Jenn Bernard has just agreed to co-author a weblog on relationships with me. I'm super excited, and will be looking for submissions. Right now, just email me until I figure out a submittal form for the site. We hope to offer a he said/she said format with witty writing and the occasional sage bit of advice. We also hope to work in relationship terms that we have coined in conversation.

The Eternal Question

Michael and I have been playing questions at work. Not like the game in the play / film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but injection deep questions into our daily banter, or deep answers to seemingly shallow questions.

"What would you do if you won the lottery? Powerball, not that scratch off shit." turned into an essay question. "It's nice to dream," he said, and a long list of kind acts followed: paying off my house, other people's student loans, kickass engagement ring for his girlfriend, vacations for co-workers. It was an excellent diversion.

So, Micahel stops me with the question, "What would it take for you to be in a long-term relationship." The snarky answers, in order of snarkiness were: "a woman," "co-dependence," and selected outtakes from the new Outkast album. While my mouth was busy trying to make Mike laugh, my brain was hard at work. I decided to amend my first answer, and discard the second two.

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First a little background. The bulk of my love life has been a Douglas Coupland novel, specifically like Andy from Generation X. Andy thinks that he's destined to never have a romantic relationship again, that he's destined to end up "friends" with any women he's interested in. And in some ways, he's okay with it.

And while I had a string of short affairs over the last couple of years, nothing's lasted more than a few months. [Okay, let's call them flings instead of affairs, nobody was married.] If I've ended up as "friends" it's because I invest so much in my friendships in the first place. I don't make friends often, maybe one or two a year, but I keep the ones I do make. Lovers are fewer and further between. And in some ways, I'm okay with it.

One explanation for this is my approach. I don't date. At least, I don't the way some people do. I don't hook up with people in bars or at parties. My relationships grow out of friendships, sometimes years after the fact. It's all more of a continuum for me. I know certain people who keep their friends & lovers separate, and never the twain shall meet. If you fall into one category, you are excluded from the other. That just doesn't make sense to me.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think that if there's not some foundation, you're dealing with infatuation instead of love -- even though you're probably dealing with that, too. I think intimacy, love, and trust are all things that build over time. As emotions, you feel them. But as phenomena, you don't just experience them, you work at them. You nurture those things over time.

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So, back to the question at hand. What would it take? Well, for starters... a woman.

Not just any female, a woman. Let's separate the women from the girls. I had a friend tell me that growing up was when you finally stop putting on airs, and come to terms with who you are. Not everything at once, your issues don't just magically disappear. You just stop putting on airs, stop caring so much what everyone thinks of you. Instead of trying to be someone, you just are. My snarky response was, "so growing up is really giving up."

In some ways, I want a woman who has given up. Given up her pretensions, at the very least. Given up trying to impress me or other people. Given up on relationships as distraction, or worse yet, relationships as therapy.

To test for this, I want one of those airport size-check boxes. "If your emotional baggage will not fit in the required space, you'll have to check it. I'm sorry, regulations." Not that I don't have my own baggage. It's just I can carry it myself. It fits into the overhead bin. And as I get older, I pack less and less.

For my part, I used to encourage this mentality. As a giving person, and a very active listener, I probably attract certain personality types. Those who are takers, and who need someone to listen. [I also encouraged this by hanging out with theatre girls, but that's a different post.] I used to think that it was up to me to help people, to give them what they were lacking in life. Now, I know that I can give up to a point, but that I need to keep some in reserve for myself, too. I also need to let people go if they're sucking the life out of me.

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The theme I really come back to is reciprocation. Two people being in relatively the same place in their lives [emotionally & socially] who are willing to give and take. There will always be some sort of imbalance, one person giving more time, more emotional support, etc. to the relationship. But if you're both giving some, and taking what the other person is giving, then I think you're on the right track. If you can communicate well, then I think you're doing pretty well for yourself.

Anyway, I'm going to go back to cracking wise, working on my friendships, and finding ways to be, in some ways, okay with it all.