Today I said "screw it" to the morning pages. Much as I love 'em, occasionally there needs to be a break -- at least to move to a different modality. Wrote for an hour and a half in my type-written journal, Mindwalk, instead.
...It was really lovely actually. Sat out on the back porch with Tigger, thwacking away at Confessor [the laptop]. I
love an overcast day. Diffused light, moisture in the air. It reminds me of how glad I am every time I walk off the plane after returning from Tucson, just to feel the air in my lungs.
Speaking of planes, picked up our geeky animator boy from the airport last night. [Well, G actually picked him up. I was allowed to tag along, cuz I wanted to hear stories ASAP.] He's still up in the air about which way he'll lean, re the big decision.
Our boy made an interesting comment: "I'm not very good at introspection. Wish I knew how to meditate." Huh. Put that way, I realize that introspection is ridiculously important to me, personally. I find myself wondering if "introspective" would be a better variable on the Meyers-Briggs personality test (blech!) than introvert/extrovert. ...I wonder what it would be like if "extrospection" were added to our society's linguistic matrix?
I'm in a quiet mood this morning. Woke up alone, house completely still. Ahhh... I forget how lovely that sensation can be sometimes. ...It leads me to wonder about what it is that I value about being alone. I mean, obviously everyone needs to have
some alone time -- what is the essential nutrient that it contains?
I think stillness is one aspect that I like about it (a separate thing from quietness). Even if I'm having "anti-social social time" with someone, there's always that subtle sense of presence, of motion somewhere in the house. There's also a sense of freedom -- that you're responsible to no one, that you don't have to heed an agenda, that anything's possible.
There's a question chewing up a lot of my consciousness recently: how much alone time do I actually want / need?
Separation of lives has been extremely important to me for quite a few years now. I've wanted to have close and strong bonds with the people that I love, but then to always have my own space that I can escape to if necessary. Does Sven "fear commitment"? --Balderdash! I have an eight-year-long relationship to counter that misbeggoten notion. My sense has been that to avoid becoming numb to the person you love, you need to be able to go home and take care of yourself from time to time. Come back refreshed. Otherwise, it's easy to start depicting the other person as the solution to all your problems -- and the irritant at the root of all failures.
However, in a question of balance rather than either / or, I've begun noticing the ways in which having a partner / lover involved in the most mundane aspects of daily existence is also rewarding. Kind of like having a second brain... [Pardon the metaphor!] They can catch what you miss, help you get back up after a crash, and generally enrich life in a hundred ways you'd never have guessed at before they happened.
So, a balancing act.
But I
hate it when people just leave a question at that: "oh, you have to balance things." Bah! Give me something useful to help me navigate,
some kind of tool!
Well, here's an idea that occured to me this morning. Let's call it the "two-thirds rule":
- Give your partners & lovers 1/3 of your money; keep 2/3 for yourself.
- Give your partners & lovers 2/3 of your time; keep 1/3 for yourself.
...I'm not married to this idea, of course. But I like having a concrete proposal to consider. I like the idea that because partners are insanely important to me, I should value them as such, electing to support them with up to 1/3 of my budget. And I think there's something to the idea of taking 1/3 of your time to be by yourself -- call that two days out of the week. Poly folk who I've heard speak often emphasize that you need to "take time for yourself". One day a week entirely alone seems like the kind of way that you might ritualize the idea -- sort of like a Jewish Shabbat. (Is a second day -- or night -- alone really necessary, too, though?)
...There's another function of being alone to mention:
composure. As much as I'm a social being (albeit an introspective one :D), I think I find myself becoming disconcerted over time by interacting with other human beings. When I get a chance to be by myself for a while, it lets my insides settle down. I feel like I reclaim composure, so that when I meet these space aliens again, I'm the self that I want to be. Sometimes reclaiming composure takes the form of cleaning house, or writing in one of my journals, or going out for a walk, or even watching TV. ...It's the
function here that's important.
I want to joke that when I'm around people, I slowly start
decomposing... Actually, though, let me put a positive spin on this. I'm a person who likes to be as articulate as possible [it's a different thing from "well-educated", mind you.] I carry myself like one of my essays -- and when I interact with other people, they edit me. Poetically, I get all marked up with red ink and arrows suggesting that I move paragraphs around. Thing is, I don't think of myself as a "perfect, authentic self", being cruelly quashed. I get better with reader input.
[Just to fudge with an indulgent metaphor a little more: I do some of my best composing verbally. The process of self-creation, on balance, is more in the dialogue than the alone time. I go home to go over readers' notes and make corrections, not so much to create "pearls for swine".]
Hm. Reconsidering the "1/3 of your time alone" notion again. Might be high. I notice that I always tend to feel better (read "more in control") when I have a longer-range picture in front of me. Time utterly alone might be necessary two or three times a month, rather than each and every week. Harumph. So hard to guess at these things.
In the "big picture" scheme of things, I need to start developing a work plan, if I'm going to make a submission to the H.P. Lovecraft filmfest this year. Last year I set aside 2nd quarter to work on a film project. So, that's the potential plan that immediately suggests itself this time around. ...But I don't want to neglect YL to that degree, if possible.
Hey, a YL news item: California is considering lowering the voting age! What I've seen so far makes me feel skeptical about how the proposal has been crafted -- but it's good news nonetheless. I'll try to get around to posting a link later.
