Waiting More Than a Dozen Years

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

--Bagheera:

Sorry for not replying sooner. I had a wireless router going wacky on me and had to put it out of it's misery.

I laughed a bit when I saw the bullet points. Why? Because I am "the nicest and most pleasant person" people have ever met. Or at least that is what they've told me.

I am aware that the nature of my being is composed of several parts that all look the same from the outside. I know the difference in the moment when no one else does. There is the "nice guy" that uses the nice guy image to be, for lack of a better word, conniving and using that "nice guy" image as a blunt instrument to be right and righteous about himself. Being right, however, also means that it makes someone wrong and it has a fairly predictable outcome. That way of being ussually is characterized by this question (as a defense): "how can you do this to me when I'm such a nice guy?" Although there are portions of my life that look like that, they do not dominate the actions or timeline.

There is the "nice guy" that I am more familiar with as a coping and even survival mode....that by being "nice" we can avoid most of the unpleasantries. That, for me, is a learned behavior from my childhood. It isn't far from who I really am and yet that way of being is based upon the following premise, perception, or words: "something is wrong!"

As a coping mechanism, this has been remarkably successful in my life, in getting me through many unpleasant times or pre-empting them in the first place. I know where that comes from, I know my history, I know how that plays out for me. And while that looks successful to most people on the outside, I know the difference in that I know when I'm dealing with the "something is wrong!" internal monologue.

The third way of being is one of actively choosing, in the moment, who we are going to be and how that is going to look "in the world." I've found that many people, if not most people, have little self-awareness on this issue or that they or others are making choices every single moment and that their future is the past played out over and over again. I know, for example, I've trained a good number of people, including my wife, to see me in a certain way. So, a good portion of this is me remembering that I chosen to do all of this and that the outcome, though not predictable, is the result of choices made in the moment.

Nobody does anything that is fundamentally uncharacteristic of who they really are (or at least not for long). And "being nice" is not uncharacterisitic of who I am when I look at the stories told about me as a child, when I did not have sufficient language to relate to the world on the basis of my past experience or memories. There was no "always" and as a child, as for most children, I was living in the moment, not past nor present. I've never really lost that ability to live in the moment. So those memories are not mine, but the story of memories from others about my inherent nature in life.

So, if I'm that aware of my own being, why am I here? Well, to use something that I don't like using, I never 'expected' to be here in this situation. I never imagined that given the option for no sex and my outright stated desire for what I wanted our sex life to look like that my wife would take the option of no sex knowing what I was asking for.

So one of the things I say about myself is that I create the situations for people to "safely" be who they really are. This is certainly true for my children and they have a real appreciation of it (how did you figure this stuff out?).


I would not liken myself as being "painted into a corner." The metaphor I would use is that I've been in this canyon that I thought I'd emerge from by now and the longer and farther I go, the more it looks like a box canyon. It certainly isn't the outcome that I would have and it is one area in my life where the reality is very different from the dream. My vocalizing it, putting it into words and how it occurs for me is but one step to create a different outcome.

I'd like to say more, but I've got to go to work and tell someone something they want to hear rather than the way things are...just kidding. More later.