Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Random Thought for the Day: "I finally get the meaning of "commencement:."

As I was driving,
that ribbon of highway,
I thought of a conversation I had been having earlier that afternoon.

I had expressed some mild displeasure about an inability to make space for what someone else was saying because I felt that I had so many personal things stored up that I could only squawk for attention like a baby bird waiting to be fed.

The other person had been offering an interpretation of my father's behaviors, which on the surface, appear helpful and selfless - many have told me so, repeatedly, over the years. I, on the other hand, being the occasionally ungrateful son that I am, have experienced them as frustratingly interfering and oddly (if not profoundly) confusing, and I think it is because of his tendency to just go ahead and "fix" situations in which others are involved if they upset his need to have things under control and appear "proper" and "nice", rather than own the feelings he has and work to get control of them.

At the time of the conversation, I nodded curtly a few times and thought, "Yeah, I know that already, what else do you got?". But, with the comfort afforded by a softly bouncing car moving along at a steady speed - an adult version of a stroller ride, I guess - a thought entered my mind: Why not ask the other person something in response, like, "What does a person do when someone acts like that - i.e., nice, but controlling?" It would have been a way to begin a conversation rather than dismiss it.

My guide for Gemini North Nodes says that being open to all the possibilities of not knowing what the answer is will make my life feel satisfying and complete. My social anxiety and obsession with figuring it out must have blocked me from simply continuing a conversation based on something another person said. Well, that's the pattern I learned from my family, after all.

After all this, I remembered something about a speech made at one of my commencement ceremonies - might have been high school or college. The speaker was saying, "we are commencing, which means beginning." I've never talked to others about this, but I'm pretty sure I was not alone in being solely focused on the fact that seemingly endless years of work and doing things for others, free of charge, was finally over and done with. Aside from a list of things to do that week, I wasn't thinking much about any big futures or great plans. That attitude has created a lot of problems in my life, but that's another story.

This afternoon, I think I realized why graduation ceremonies could rightly be called "commencements." And the reason is, that when you expand your horizons beyond the fear of getting something wrong and the compulsive need to get this, that, and all these other things "right," - which is largely what "school" can be about - you open to the possibilities of the future rather than being consumed with going over and over the closures of the past. Opening a dialogue can be like commencing a new chapter in your life, without the usual expectations and tyrannies of the past.

Well, it made sense when I was thinking about it in the car.

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