mahiwaga

What do I miss, really? Some idealized version of Home, something that never existed, and can’t possibly exist for quite some time. I do not daydream of Los Angeles—at least not too much. I do not pine for some sense of stability and peace in the City of Angels, living at home with my parents, and going about my everyday life there. And as much as I’ve remarked about my missing Berkeley and the times I had there, I cannot yet foresee myself returning to the Bay Area in the near future, setting up shop, and settling down. Not everyone who was there is still there after all, and I’ve got quite a few years before I can even ponder this sort of decision.

The future is murky. Despite my new-found attitude of trying to see the silver lining in every cloud, I feel that there are several more transformations I have to undergo before I can pretend everything is going to be all right. Perhaps that Sunday afternoon driving from O’Hare in a deluge can serve as a constructive metaphor. I have to forge on even if I can’t see what’s in front of me. Driving through the heart of the storm made me feel alive, knowing that instant death lay all around. But that can’t be the end-all-be-all of life, living on the razor-thin edge of transient existence. There’s got to be a place where I can just pull up my feet and watch the fire burn in the hearth while the blizzard howls outside, and maybe, just maybe, I can listen to my beloved hum a melody as I hold her in my arms. But that last may be a little too much. I would just settle for the footstool and the warm hearth at this point. (And maybe a book to read and a pipe to smoke, but those are mere trifles. OK, so it’s August right now, but I’m sitting directly under the A/C duct, and it makes me think of winter. Very bizarre, I know.)

Despite my skepticism of Freud, I irrationally hold on to the idea that traumas experienced in childhood can explain a lot of adult behavior, even when at the time you couldn’t possibly comprehend what was going on. Maybe they left some sort of indelible mark on my soul. Perhaps it etched my fear of the dark and my fear of silences into my heart. But perhaps it awakened in me the idea, the longing, that Home was supposed to be everyone you loved being together. Learning by negative example, I suppose.

I’ve unfortunately spent too many years away from people I care about. True, a lot of it isn’t just because of my own choices—my friends and family have had to make their own distant sojourns. But I think I’m getting too used to it, and despite my sometimes vociferous rantings to the contrary, I really do believe there are some things you shouldn’t get used to.

Yes, all of a sudden I miss my family. I’ve had snatches of conversations with them, from thousands of miles distant, but it’s a pale shadow of what I wish I had. I feel a little sad that my mom and my dad will have to return to their routine of missing each other because of their different work schedules. For the most part they each spend their time alone in an empty house, now that my brother’s knee is healed up enough so he can head back to Davis on Saturday. And lately I worry that I’m not blazing the right path for my sister, that I’ve led her down some philosophical dead-end track into an infested jungle.

I wrote it before, and I guess it’s still true, that the idea of family is central to my conception of Home. But I know I can’t live in the past. I’ve got to plan for my future, and so that’s where the Home that I dream of has to be, as far off and as unimaginable as it may be. I suppose that in the mean time, there’s work to be done in the garden. I suppose that’s how it works, that’s what that old story means. My responsibility is the garden. Everything else is up to Chance, Fate, the Way, or God, depending on what you believe in (but it’s really all the same thing).

I really, really, really should go outside, but I feel like I have regressed just a bit as of late emotionally , and I kind of wonder if it’s the aspartame that I have been imbibing quite liberally as of late.

I thought about it this morning (a crappy stale gray morning, with the look and feel of the warm insides of a used shoe), while enduring a caffeine hangover and suffering from the general lack of sleep: For some reason I can’t seem to sustain contentment. After no more than a week, I get all walled up again. I stop believing in things that would make me content, or even happy. And I wonder if it’s true.

<out-of-my-ass> They say there’s a gene found in humans that makes people more alert than usual. Apparently this was quite useful back in the days of living in caves and having to stay out of the way of huge predators. This gene had obvious implications on the survival of human populations. Unfortunately, it also rendered the individual carrier of this gene insomniac, anxious, and generally unfit to live a normal life.</out-of-my-ass>

So at times like this I wonder. Let’s just dub the gene the Worrier gene just for the sake of simplicity. I admit it. I am a worrier. My mother is a worrier, and my sister is a worrier, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one of my maternal grandparents was a worrier too.

The symptoms: If something is not for certain, if it is not set in stone, then I fret. I imagine worst-case scenarios. I try not to get wrapped up in best-case scenarios. Expect the worst. Be prepared. That sort of madness. Hence my all-or-nothing type of personality. Either it’s true or it ain’t. If I don’t know, then I will gnaw away at it until I do know. Even if there’s really no way I could ever know. My mind is not very good at coping with maybes and perhapses.

Ironically, I did not turn into a Type-A personality. Since my freshman year in college, I have tried to internalize the idea of the Tao, which just happens to go hand in hand with a lot of theoretical physics. Just going with the flow of an inherently uncertain universe seems like the best course of action most of the time. (God, I’m a lazy worrier. How unfortunately paradoxic.) So at times I feel like I’m waging an internal war with myself, worrying but then having to stop myself from worrying, being anxious but fighting to stay calm, emotionally swinging wildly in bipolar directions but realizing that I have to achieve balance.

But this is the reason why I can’t stay happy or even content for very long. My doubts multiply at a very rapid clip, and it’s hard to keep my self-confidence up. At times like this it seems like my only choices are to go mad or to give up. And despite my proclamations of insanity, I really would prefer not to be crazy.

But there again is that artificial dichotomy thing: this or that, mania or depression, insanity or surrender. Intellectually, I know that extremes do not exist in reality. In normal reality (i.e., not in the vacuum of space, or anything physically weird like that), there is no such thing as absolutely hot or absolutely cold, only things that are hotter than most things, and things that are colder than most things. There is no such thing as absolute beauty nor absolute ugliness. No absolute good nor absolute evil. It’s all relative to whatever point of reference you choose, because in reality, everything is mostly homogenous, but human beings can’t think that way without going crazy. We’ve been built to notice the minute differences and to exaggerate them so we can navigate in our world. But I think the Tao got it all right. Light contains darkness, darkness bears light. Dichotomies do not exist for anything. It’s all about spectra, a smooth transition from one state to another, and in reality they’re really just one state.

Then again, it’s easy to intellectually understand something, but quite another to feel it, and as much as I hate to admit it, physiology and neuroscience have taught me that emotions are a better barometer of perception than any cerebral rationalization. Unless you’ve got some kind of brain lesion, if you’re feeling some emotion, there’s probably some reason for it, rational or not, and you’ve got to deal with whatever that reason is, no matter how trifling.

So here I am, having rationalized my way into another infinite circle, with too much time to think, but not enough time to live life. I’ve got to get away from dichotomous thinking and I’ve got to stop listening to the shadows that creep in the darkness, whispering doubts into my ears as I sleep, and I’ve got to truly feel that the universe is as it should be, more or less, and I’ll I really need to do is just find my proper path through it.