It's How I'm Wired

Sometimes I wish I could say, “I’m there.” But as the saying goes, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Although each day I better understand and accept that life is a process, I still get impatient with myself. I pray about it, as I watch myself struggle. Recently, I was reminded by a friend, “Harold, you’re hard on yourself,” and then she added, “and this makes you hard on others.” Of course, the good news is that I don’t have a corner on the market. Most of us are rowing the same boat, and when you think about it, the company can be comforting.

As much as anything for which I give thanks, I am blessed to be living in a place where consciousness seems to be the norm—at least in the circles where I travel. I have the privilege of knowing a handful of people who remind me every day that my need to grow, and hopefully change, is a good thing. My dear mother’s take on my penchant for change was that I get bored with the familiar, and then dissatisfaction is not far behind. In a sense, that would have it be mostly about the pursuit, which isn’t necessarily bad. In the past, I allowed myself to feel a little guilty about not only looking to new horizons but indeed being drawn, being dazzled by them.
Thankfully, I realize that it’s okay. It’s how I’m wired.

I’m learning to give myself permission—permission to be restless, to sometimes say “no,” which is painfully hard for someone who is a born people pleaser, permission to be a little selfish now and then. That begs the question of what is selfish, although we have been socialized to recognize selfishness in its various stripes and spots. As tough as it is, I’m crawling toward taking baby steps on challenges everywhere I look.

I’m learning to remind myself to be a little easier on both myself and on others. “Take the best and leave the rest,” a friend here says. The literature is ripe, ripe with advice that for our own sanity and happiness we must accept others without trying to change them. How many relationships fail because at least one of the parties needs to change the other. The good news about all the advice we get and give is that we’re really talking to ourselves, hoping that by saying it aloud we will finally get through to ourselves.

The light is dawning for me, although at times only a flicker. For the first time in my life—at least as I see it—I am partner worthy. I’ve had intimate, relatively sustained relationships in the past, but they all played second chair to my birth family. No, let me be more honest. They were hamstrung by my sense of duty to my late mother. Many years ago, an old friend told my partner at the time, “If you think you will be more important than Harold’s family, think again”—or whatever he said. I wasn’t present for the conversation. It’s all up to me now to make myself available. I can’t lay that responsibility on anyone else’s shoulders. Just as I finally accepted that I couldn’t make my mother happy, I know equally that I am not responsible for anyone else’s happiness. Equally, whatever bliss I can know lives inside me. Realizing that I have something really wonderful to offer another man—that I can be a part of something so full of possibility, so challenging, so completing—well, I’m humbled by this rediscovery in my 65th year. Finally, he’s not just around the corner, as I’ve sensed for so long. I’m putting up—not shutting up—embracing him in the now, right here. And so it is.

It’s How I’m Wired—Santa Fe New Mexico (May 7, 2009)
R. Harold Hollis