#gratitudeNow:Garage to Garage

1 hour drive

over in moments

Last night I walked out of my office a little before 7pm, walked to the garage, and got in my car. Then I drove the hour or so between where I work and where I live, and pulled into my own garage at home.  It's a long commute.  But it went by like no time at all.

The reason for that is I was talking to Moliére.

We've been friends for years now.  I first met him through mutual friends of ours.  He knew of me through my work on the podcast, and asked some mutual friends of ours to introduce him to me.  I was up at their kinky bed & breakfast to teach a class.  He came to meet me beforehand, and we spent a long time together chatting and just getting to know one another.  I liked him enormously from the get-go.

That had to have been four or five years ago at this point.  

We're similar in many ways.  We're both techies, both love puns, have many of the same sensibilities for things in life.  We both have excellent taste in partners, too.  Did I mention he's my metamour?  Yep.

You know that song My Boyfriend's Girlfriend Isn't Me?  It's like that.  Oh you don't? Here.

So anyhow, back to Moliére.  We've been close for ages.  Our relationship, like all relationships, has had its ups and downs.  We've endured hardship, apart and together.  The part where we're metamours is relatively new, and it's not without adjustment.

That's not a bad thing though.  Last weekend we got together, just him and me, to talk about where we are, how we feel about one another, and to eat really good poké.  

We love one another, a whole lot.  We always have.  We're still figuring out all the various things we mean to one another.  It's a good thing.

So when I got in the car in the first garage, I decided to call him, just because I felt like chitchatting, spending time.  We joked around, talked about all sorts of stuff, laughed, did some insightful thinking about ageplay and porn, and just generally basked in the warmth of one another's company.

Before I knew it, I was in the second garage, the one in my house.  I really love him, and I'm so grateful he's in my life.

#gratitudeNow:Some cutting remarks on privilege

So, here's a picture of yours truly, prior to getting some surgery, yesterday.  

I was in the hospital to get a vasectomy.

It went really well for the most part.  We showed up. I gave my name. They asked me some questions, I took off my clothes, put on a funny hat and the hospital-gown-what-makes-your-butt-hang-out.

One thing that did come up was people kept asking me, and Missy, if we had children, if we wanted children, were we sure about the procedure, etc. etc. etc.  It got asked a lot.  I kept saying I was sure, no we didn't have them, no we didn't want them.  It was honestly kind of upsetting.  

I could tell that much like the silent e that follows some words what they were really asking was either, "So you're not going to change your mind in a few days, right?" or maybe, "After you sign these consent forms and we invade your body to cut you up a bit, you're not going to come back with a lawyer and sue our pants off, right?"

There was even this brief bureaucratic mix-up, where the normal hospital policy is that you can't be scheduled for a vasectomy until 4 weeks after you've made the decision.  I was clocking in at a way-too-fast-for-their-comfort three weeks.  Because I'm so in a rush, right?

Actually, this is a decision I've been considering for the better part of a decade.  I'm 46 years old, recently started a new business which is very likely to make me travel a whole bunch.  Plus, I'm polyamorous, and have loving connections with my partner Alissa's children, whom I'm not exactly a parent to, but not exactly not one either.  I already raised my ex's kid, my stepson T. for the better part of nine years too.

So I'm pretty set on my choice.  Which is good, because it happened yesterday.

The reason I'm talking about it here, where the gratitude comes in, is because the whole experience made me aware of just how much agency, how much control I have over my own body and my own life.  Yes, the hospital administration and staff, and my own urologist got all up in my business about my choice.  But in the end, I signed papers, and they shut right the hell up and did what I wanted.  

My co-pay for the hospital stay was twenty bucks.

I have a female friend, L., who never wanted to have children, and was looking to have some sort of procedure to do something about it.  I can't exactly recall whether she wanted a tubal ligation or a full hysterectomy, but she spent the better part of her 20's trying to find a doctor who'd agree to do it, and coming up empty.  

Frankly, that ticks me off.  

Sure, as a polyamorous, kinky person I'm not quite like most folks. But I do have good "vanilla" face.  From the outside, I sure look like a typical cisgender white middle class male.  And it comes with a lot of privilege.  

It's got me yet more cognizant of how other people who are not in my same demographic don't have the advantages I do.  

There's already stuff I do to try to help with that.  I'm a big old lefty when I vote.  I actively give money to the ACLU and do micro-loans through Kiva.org.  For which I want no pat on the back whatsoever.  

This is why universal, single-payer healthcare is a deciding issue for me.  It's why I understand reproductive health isn't a luxury, it's a right.  

EVERYONE should have the power and ability to make the choice over their body, their life, that I made over my own yesterday. I think part of the purchase price of having agency over one's own life is making sure society changes to give it to everyone.

#gratitudeNow:A promise fulfilled

So I have loved science fiction since I was a kid.​

 Back when I was about 12, maybe 14 I first read this amazing story, Return from the Stars by Stanislaw Lem.  In the story, Hal Bregg, a cosmonaut returns to Earth after a 10 year mission to space, to a distant star called Formalhaut.  But due to relativity, 10 years in space is much, much longer on Earth.

Returning to Earth isn't easy on Bregg.  The world has evolved in vast, strange ways that he struggles to comprehend, to adapt to, in order to be able to live happily. 

i won't tell you how the world of the book has changed, part of the joy in reading the story is experiencing the bewilderment and delight along with the main character.  

I am going to make one exception though.  There's something incredibly prescient in the book.  It's the description in chapter three of a bookshop. 

 I spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been printed for nearly half a century. And how I had looked forward to them, after the microfilms that made up the library of the Prometheus!

No such luck.

No longer was it possible to browse among shelves, to weigh volumes in the hand, to feel their heft the promise of ponderous reading. The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystal: with recorded contents. They could be read with the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me.

The public preferred lectons—lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation. Only scientific publications having a very limited distribution were still printed, on a plastic imitation paper. Thus all my purchases fitted into one pocket though there must have been almost three hundred titles. A handful of crystal com—my books. I selected a number of works on history and sociology, a few on statistics and demography, and what the girl from Adapt had recommended on psychology.

A couple of the larger mathematical textbooks—larger, of course, in the sense of their content not of their physical size. The robot that served me was itself an encyclopedia, in that—as it told me—it was linked directly, through electronic catalogues, to templates of every book on Earth. As a rule, a bookstore had only single “copies” of books, and when someone needed a particular book, the content of the work was recorded in a crystal.

I read that on my opton, I mean my iPad as I sat this morning waiting for my car to be repaired at a mechanic.  It was weirdly meta.  

I knew it was coming. I have read this book before.  The last time was a dog eared paperback book I bought in the only English bookstore I could find in Cannes, France.  At the time I was living overseas with my family for the summer, on holiday, and I was absolutely   desperate  for books.  I went to that bookstore several times, and bought a ton of books. I remember thinking at the time how amazing it would be to have such a device, and be able to read and listen to books at my leisure.

And now, it's true.  

#gratitudeNow:Fix the sync

So this morning, I'm talking with my girlfriend Alissa...

Which is something we do just about every morning.  We were catching up on the past couple of days, and talking about our today.  She was having a plumber over, to fix her kitchen sink.

Which is when something small, that's something really big actually happened.

My brain, like some oddball cotton candy machine, dredged the big churning plastic paddles (go with my here, it's a complex food metaphor) through the pink sugary goo that is my long-term memory.

There was a noise on her end of the call, a chip clip clacking together.  It sounded kind of like a knock at the door.  To which I quipped some joke about how "It's the plumber, he's here to fix the sink."

She said, "um, what?"  And I couldn't quite honestly tell her why I said it.  Maybe it was some game or joke I played as a kid?  So I sat and concentrated on it real hard.  And then I looked it up on Google.

And I found this:

It's a little cartoon short, made in 1971, from a children's program called The Electric Company.  1971 happens to also be the year something else was made: me.  TEC was a sort of companion program, or maybe competition for Sesame Street.  I absolutely loved it when I was a kid.  (Especially because they had little short features with Spider-man, like this one.)

Anyhow, this short used to absolutely destroy me when I was little.  I thought it was one of the funniest things I ever saw.  Guess what?  Still pretty darn funny.

Why am I so grateful for this?  Because it's yet another profound insight about mindfulness.  Forty-six years ago this little video came out on television, and I did, at a hospital.  Then maybe five years later I saw it, and loved it.  And then forty-one years after that, I'm loving it all over again.

I think it's a profound commentary on loss, and our own perspective.  Things happen, they become a part of our life, our self, and then they get packed away, tamped down into our memory and our character by all the subsequent stuff that comes after.  

Every so often one of these returning guest stars pops up and is front and center again.  It's kind of amazing.  We don't really lose anything, do we?

#gratitudeNow:Chasing

A big part of my practice of meditation and contemplation has to do with self-knowledge.  

I journal a lot.  Well, you know.  You're reading it after all.  For a long time now I've been examining who I am, what matters to me.

I realized something big today.  I've been missing a key component of the question "who am I?"  In its short form it's an unanswerable question, really.  You can point to aspects of yourself, sure.  But you can't really speak in totality to who you are.  It's like describing a whole house by the shape of the doorknob to the front door.

The part that I've been omitting is the words "right now", as in "Who am I right now?"   

Now that is more knowable.  And it's also subject to change.  About 5 years ago I recorded a video blog to myself (not on here, privately) about my desires in life.  I wanted to stop doing technical work altogether, and go back to school to become a licensed professional counselor, a form of therapist. 

In the same video I talk about my relationships, what's important to me, what was motivating me. 

When I watched it recently, I thought, "Who the heck even was that guy?" 

I can remember recording it.  I can remember some of those feelings.  I watch myself, and see the conviction in my eyes, hear it in my voice. 

And the vast majority of what I spoke about with such fervor is no longer true.  I'm barely that person at all anymore.  Many of the things I thought I wanted, and all of the relationships I had at the time have since changed.  Some of my goals I outright have moved on from.  Some of my relationships from back then have ended.  Other goals and relationships have evolved.  And there's all sorts of new goals and people in my life, now.

It's almost dizzying how different everything is. 

One thing that has stayed a constant is that who I am now is informed by everything that's come before.  So, there was no waste in any of it, and the fact that I pivoted on some pretty major things isn't a bad thing - it's growth. 

A really enormous part of who I am now has to do with a set of attitudes I have, around the idea of pursuit, of chasing.  It's something I've been contemplating for the better part of the last two years.

I absolutely do chase goals.  I absolutely don't chase people.

What I mean by that is this: in terms of life changes that I initiate, things like career goals, new skills, changes in my health, exercise, financial well-being, I run towards those things, full-tilt boogie.  If it is something scary, even better.  BRING IT. 

But in terms of people, I do exactly the opposite.  I'm moving forward, towards things, at a breakneck pace.  It's a wild ride, and one I'm happy to share with those who are going in the same directions, or at least compatible ones.  But for those who don't feel it, and aren't interested in sharing the trip, I'm okay with moving on.  I have friends who I was thick as thieves with, who I haven't talked to in years.  I have relationships that were vibrant, which have ended.  I think that's natural.

Don't mistake me though.  I'm not cavalier about it.  It's often bittersweet to me when these changes happen.  One of the more painful ones recently is my stepson.  We're quite estranged.  He's just moving in directions that make how he lives and how I live incompatible.  I'm sad about it sometimes, but most days I'm at peace.

I recognize that the person I am today isn't the same person I was yesterday, by a little degree.  Shift that lens out from days to months to years, and that delta gets even bigger.  And that's true for other people, too.

Two particular items from my long study of Taoism popped out at me today that are about just this relationship between chasing goals and people. 

One is a zen story, by Chuang-tze, called "The Happiness of Fish."  The super-short version of it goes like this:

A sage and his friend stood on a bridge overlooking a river, watching fish leaping from the water into the air.  The sage said, "That right there, that's the happiness of fish."  His friend chided him for it.  "How can you, who are not a fish, know the happiness of one by this river?"  He in turn gently chided his friend, "How are you, who are not me, know that I don't know it?"

As the friend scratched his head, the sage added, "Furthermore, you already said how I know it, I know it here, by the river." 

How do I know what makes me happy?  I don't know what always makes me happy.  I know what I'm after right now.  That's why it's okay to chase things and goals.  If what you want changes, you chase something else.

The other thing from my studies that jumped out at me is a particular verse from the Tao te Ching.  This one: 

33

Knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength;
mastering yourself is true power.

If you realize that you have enough,
you are truly rich.
If you stay in the center
and embrace death with your whole heart,

you will endure forever.

I feel like I have unlocked a whole new understanding of this verse today.  Yes, I can learn all sorts of things about other people.  But in the end, they, like myself, are always subject to change.  There's no permanence in people.  I can learn about them, spend time with them, enjoy their company.  But I can't stop their their changing, nor my own changing.  

That's why it's so important to be mindful about who, what, where, and when I am.  It's why I need to be present for my connections with others, because they are fleeting.  People grow, and change.  It's why it matters so much to be present for them now, knowing that our time together isn't permanent.  Not because people are bad.  We're all just so very fluid.  

Part of what makes love and connection so great, so beautiful is that it's fleeting.  

I never got that "embrace death with your whole heart" thing before.   But I see it now.  It's not morose or maudlin.  It's profound.