Musing On A Monday

I refuse to believe anymore that there is something wrong. That I have to change, or adapt, or concede, or contain, or compromise. That somehow I’ve done this, or I’ve done that…and tsk, tsk. I own my choices, every turn, every step. Regardless of results, regardless of how others may observe them, I own them, no one else.

I own every last breath of grief, every tear, every regretful morning, and, therefore, I own ALL my joy, my bliss, my happiness. I have already won. I choose to already be a success.

Because that IS how it feels. How it felt when it all changed. That day I woke up and thought that it was not everyone else who had to see me as strong, I had to be strength. To detach myself.

Just read this post about Outlaw Magic. And I thought YES. It helped me to see another piece. A side that, for some reason, already knew this. Just was keeping it a secret, I suppose.

To be serious means you suffer if it looks like you’re losing, and you exalt if it looks like you’re winning.

To play the finite game with seriousness means you try to make finite ends mean infinite things like approval and love. It means to place limits on approval and love, to constrain them.
…
The outlaw is an outlaw because she’s stopped playing the finite game with any seriousness. She’s outside of its rules, outside of its laws.
[IBID]

I won’t pretend to play the game anymore. I have done that for so long now, that I guess I thought at some future point I’d win. Whatever “winning” meant. That changed, I suppose, over time. But still, somewhere in the future was this END POINT.

I don’t WANT an end point. I don’t want some fixed place where I wait for my dreams to come true. As the post says…for my love and comfort .

Comfort is a cage. A place I have been at before, but I eventually came to see the illusion. That marriage was, at one point at least, comfortable. Some 20 years or so on, I have had few comforts, but I’ve lived.

Well, I’ve prospered. I’ve felt, I’ve cried, and I’ve watched death stalk the living.

It is not pretty. But it was real, Mom. Oh, yes, it was most definitely real. There was truth, and with Tim, still there where his lies, aching in pain, trapped inside the edges of his soul. And as I watched death, I realized I had never really feared it. Merely the thought of dying, not death itself.

In all of her interactions with people — whether she’s selling something or flirting or nurturing or arguing or teaching or dancing — there’s a ringing clarity and ease.

The clarity is the absence of a covert agenda. She’s no longer asking for validation in anything she does.
[IBID]

But you forget all of that. Sometimes, I think life, society perhaps, hides that truth from us, or tries to. Replaced with what everyone else deems the proper keening, desirous yearning for the cage of comfort, we are lured away from ourselves. We seek out love like it is some panacea, some all consuming greatness.

It is, it can be, but…but…