Thursday, June 4, 2009

Blast from the Past

Sometimes a regression is the easiest way to really see how far you've come. I had a trip to yesterday yesterday (the first yesterday being figurative, the second literal when I started this, "poetic" now.) I acted like I used to act. I don't know what the character defect is called. "Surrendering the self" might be appropriate but I've never seen it on a list of character defects. "Fear" works, too. How well "fear" works to describe my past....

A neighboring town had baseball-size hail; we were in the path of the general storm, had no idea how badly we'd be hit. (Short answer: not even much rain.) With excess cars over garage space, we took two cars to find shelter elsewhere. The story is long and involved, but basically I was in one car near my husband in the other, and I was faced with the question of whether to move for somebody else. My instinct was to move. But I fell back into the fear, into trying to imagine my husband's thoughts, and I did what I thought was rude because I expected it would be his choice. It wasn't. He thought I was rude, too. And I was. But my big issue (especially since there was no hail after all) was what it felt like to regress to the character defect of trying to please by abandoning myself, by surrendering my will to the wrong "higher power."

This program is a miracle.

I was working with quotations yesterday for a project, and two stand out:
  • "There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered." Nelson Mandela
  • the other was not in the list but was a conversation between my son and me when I copied that to him in the IM box:
    • son: The converse to the statement is also revealing.
    • me: yeah. Like going home and reverting?
    • son: like going somewhere that has changed and that revealing how little change has happened in you.

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