Slinging Hash At The Karma Cafe

Ah, growth. That gorgeous, confusing, hyper-aware time in which your theories on life, so casually slung about like eggs on some greasy spoon griddle wind up with their yolks unceremoniously broken on the sticky spatula of experience. When everything you ever thought you knew, that looked so good on paper, doesn't hold up to real life. Simultaneously exhilarating and humiliating, you swell past the self-imposed limits of your own smallness, the neat buttons that once held your id so carefully in check popping off like candy. For that brief time, everything falls away and you stand there naked, bewildered, looking around like you've never seen the place before. Because in a way, you haven't. Not from this perspective, at least. It's what you live for, even as you flinch and scream as you watch it hurtle toward you in slow-motion light speed.

The transformation junkie that I am, it's probably no surprise that I'm at it again.

Perhaps even less of a surprise, it's a man. Sort of. I mean, he is a man, definitely, but he's only part of the picture, existing within a larger landscape instead of the subject of a portrait. There has been much change in me this year, and in a way I see this latest development as a product of that, a graduation into new territory...I hope...and not just another chance to go around the same loop and wind up at the beginning of the roller coaster all over again.

The most palpable change, the one that paradoxically rips the rug of certainty right out from under my feet, is that I know what I want.

See, I always thought that was a bad thing. That the less you wanted, the more you'd be happy with whatever you got. And I figured most of what I wanted wasn't realistic anyway, so why bother. As always, the universe is nothing if not efficient. Don't care what you get, and you spend all your time coping with what you get; bending and contorting and struggling to fit into whatever ill-sized outfit was thrown your way. The universe rewards the articulate. Ask for what you want, you just might get it. Sure you have to be careful & all that, but where along the way did that translate into "don't ask for what you want, because you don't really want it"?

I think the coolest thing about learning what I want (I originally wrote "knowing", as though I knew all there was to know about it and I could just close the book and move onto the next thing), is that every face I see is no longer potentially what I maybe might need. I don't have to try everything looking for that elusive something, a flavor my psyche can't quite identify. I know it when I see it now, from twenty paces. Or to be more honest, I know when I don't see it. Which does everyone a great big favor. Nobody's wasting anyone's time (“as though that were really possible,” the little wise voice in the back of my head clucks). I wonder how much I led people on by not knowing. I wonder if I'm the last person in the world to figure this out.

But hell, who cares? What is more important is that there is energy freed up in my life for other things. And it’s fascinating what all has popped up for examination these past few weeks.

Most pressing is the need for boundaries. I think I’ve said before, I’ve always viewed a need boundaries as a sign that I wasn’t “evolved” enough, that I was strapped into some sort of ego trip, that the illusion was taking me for a ride. You know, kind of along the same lines as knowing what you want. I didn’t have any significant limits as a kid, so I guess it’s not great surprise that I’ve always viewed them as a bad thing. But maybe (she said, choking on her Saturn return) limits are a good thing, helpful, especially in moving me toward those ideals of mine – that is, all those things I want in life. And of course we remember from above that wanting is a bad thing, so really it’s no wonder I’ve been so frozen stuck for so long. To move in any direction would have meant to devalue my own quest for growth. Or worse, admit that I’m not perfect. I guess part of my journey right now is accepting that I am allowed to take up space in the world, and that my preferences do sometimes matter, and that maybe it’s just that they make a better servant than master. And that maybe, just maybe, the world is as non-absolute as I always ramble about it being.

And here’s this sweet man in my life reminding me to let myself off the hook, to give myself time to think and decide what actually works for me, what respects me and serves me and isn’t horribly awfully disfiguringly codependent, and I’m just so damned grateful with every single breath to have someone in my life who actually knows what to say to me when I get all wrapped up in trying to be all ethereal and uber-enlightened. Someone to lovingly spank me with the practicality stick and encourage me to move beyond the self-imposed prison of my untested beliefs. Thank goodness for not so small miracles.