This is true of many things, not just of love: We confuse genuine affection and real love with the light, happy, free feeling we experience for a few seconds/days/months when we have fed our egos.
That’s why it doesn’t last. That’s why we hold onto ideas of things that were and things we need to be: The idea of someone saves something about ourselves. And the more we hold onto those fragments of a person, those soundbite dreams that distract us from the moment, we end up with a few distilled memories that we’ve turned into life-sustaining hopes, and we piece it all together and place it on the shoulders of the person who we thought loved us enough to make us love ourselves.
And if you’re not careful, that person will become a part of you. They will become the good part, the whole part, the love of your life.
52
WHY WE
SUBCONSCIOUSLY
love to create
PROBLEMS
FOR OURSELVES
I think most people could objectively look at their lives and see how frequently the problems they had were of their own making, their suffering self-inflicted. We absolutely love to make problems for ourselves, and we do it all the time.
We worry needlessly, we choose immobility, we resist acceptance, we externalize our power, we surrender our ability to choose, when really it’s up to us to decide how we react, when we change, what we entertain our minds with. It’s yet another symptom of our own masochism to say that we don’t have a choice in the matter.
And we do it because we love it. There’s something…fun…in making problems for ourselves. There is something we keep returning to. Whether it be because we feel we deserve it, that it gives our lives meaning, that it gives us human credibility for having been through something—anything—
we want to create our own problems.
Because when we are the ones who make them, we are the ones who can overcome them.
It seems we almost stage accomplishments in our minds. We subconsciously know that we’re going to get through it, but we choose to entertain the suffering only to feel that sense of “ah, I’ve done something, I’ve proven my own strength.” We make things difficult so they seem warranted of feeling good when they aren’t anymore. The more we suffer, the more something is worthwhile.
We craft our victories subconsciously. We know there’s no point in fretting or worrying about anything: If something can be solved, solve it. If it cannot, worrying and fretting will not suddenly change that. In either scenario, it is pointless, needless noise.
But the point is that we like worrying and fretting. If we didn’t like it so much, we probably wouldn’t do it incessantly. It feeds some human part of us that modernization has robbed us of. What are we surviving? What is the point? Why, why, why?
Well, because when everything has an answer, what is there to do? If everything has a solution, what is there to consider, or work toward, or feel excited about accomplishing? Or rather, really, why do we need to work toward something? Why do we need to feel excited about accomplishments rather than what we already have? What exists within us that is so unsettled that we cannot be at peace?
I think we create our own problems to address the things we know would otherwise become issues outside of our control. We make them in ways that allow us to heal, address, fix, cope, and acknowledge whatever we want to get to before some other heartbreaking, external circumstance does it for us.
We create our own problems in the scope of knowing we eventually have the solutions, so we can safely (albeit painfully) deal with them. So really, it’s not a matter of not making issues for ourselves, but being aware enough to understand what they are…and that we’re asking ourselves to heal them.
53
WHY DOES
a soul want
A BODY?
Yesterday I took a shortcut while walking home and ended up crossing through a small graveyard in the back of a city church. I stopped and I looked at the names and the dates and the veterans and the three-year-olds and loving wives and fathers and sisters and husbands the immortalized bits of what their lives were summed up to be and I thought to myself, Why would a soul want a body?
What can a body do that a soul can’t? Why would it want an impermanent, gross, heavy, hurting thing?
I was standing in front of a husband and wife that died in the late 1800s. I looked at their final resting places, a few inches away from one another, and realized,
A soul can’t touch.
Assuming the idea that a soul is an energy field, that our spirits do indeed exceed the speck of life our bodies provide in the span of infinity, a soul can’t touch. It can’t see the light; it is the light.
It doesn’t know the need for human skin. It can’t run its fingers over someone else’s hand and neck and back and it can’t feel crippling desire and ecstatic passion. Those are symptoms of a madness we call love, but it’s human love. It’s often shallow and wild and manic and the equivalent of smoking crack cocaine. It melts into an appreciation of something deeper, or it burns brightly and then it goes out.
Souls can’t experience a beginning or an end, nor an array and spectrum of emotions. They can’t be surprised because they were never confused or unknowing. They don’t know physical-emotional warmth or what it’s like to hold and kiss a new baby on the forehead or the jilt you get in your chest when you smell the person you love.
Your soul can’t feel the cadence of reading your favorite book or the sensation when your mind puts someone else’s story into your life, or how
your fingers flip through the broken binding for the trillionth time and how lovely that book smell is, especially when it’s your favorite one.
It doesn’t know that crisp and comforting coolness of fall or the heat of the sun on your back in the summer. It doesn’t know that deep feeling you get when you spread your fingers out and run your hand through water. It can’t wear your favorite T-shirt or eat cookie dough or sweat or breathe or cry or dance. It doesn’t know the lifetime comfort of your mother or your lover wrapping their arm around you matter-of-factly.
A body is responsible for the most amazing part of anything—physically finding or creating. Once we have something, we don’t want it anymore.
What we really want is to make and fight and become.
A soul doesn’t have to pay the bills or go food shopping or cook dinner or schedule a checkup or do the dishes or make plans for Friday to keep up with a relationship. It doesn’t have to take hot baths to relax or organize the house or run errands or take walks to think. A body can learn. A body can feel the magic of realization. It can piece the pieces together and understand. It can get lost so it can be “found.” It can suffer so it can heal.
What if the series of rote tasks we want our lives to be better than aren’t better than us at all? What if they’re what we’re scheduled to do? What if there is no greater meaning than just simply doing them? What if what we feel in those little moments we want to escape and place in the context of a greater meaning is the meaning itself?
If healing is just acknowledging pain, then maybe living is just acknowledging life.
There are so many anxieties and frustrations and terrible things that cease instantly when we just say them out loud. The point of learning to grieve and mourn and be present is only so we can just be aware. Recognition is the remedy. It’s the only thing we’re really supposed to do.