When I look at Herself, I totally see my wife. I feel love for her. I feel powerful sexual attraction for her -- more powerful, indeed, than for many many a month. I have to check the "honeys" and "sweeties" as they try to leave the mouth. When she's near me -- and she likes to do this close-physical-proximity thing, much closer than she used to before -- I have to physically restrain the arm or the hand from reaching around her or patting her bottom.
Yet simultaneously I can totally see her as my ex-wife. I can easily imagine myself with someone else.
And that disjuncture, that disconnect -- it causes me no cognitive dissonance, no pain, at all. I'm reminded of people who have near-death experiences and relate how they felt like they were floating above themselves, just watching the docs do their thing.
That's how I feel too. Sure I'd love to rebuild the marriage but I don't want to hinge the rest of my self around it and I won't. The door's open if you want to come back.
It's like the scene you mentioned from Band of Brothers; "Until you accept the fact that you're already dead, you can't do your job as a soldier." Or Jim Collin's conversation with Adm Jim Stockdale in "Good to Great":
I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”
“The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused, given what he’d said a hundred meters earlier.
“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say,‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
To this day, I carry a mental image of Stockdale admonishing the optimists: “We’re not getting out by Christmas; deal with it!”
It's so much easier once you "deal with it".
Last edited by orangedog; 06/03/0906:13 PM.
"My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand." Thich Nhat Hanh
