You all know by now, if you’ve been following these posts, that I’m quite open and authentic and like to swear a bit.
So fuck me it’s been a tough few weeks.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my positioning as a therapist. I’ve had some personal stuff to work out, which I will perhaps dive into in a later instalment. I’ve spent a bit of time questioning the meaning of “meaning”. That was a fun one.
As I hit 40 recently, I was waiting for the stereotypical crisis of purpose and the mournful regret of missed experiences. Apparently that’s supposed to happen to men when we hit 40 (or so people kept telling me). Nothing really manifested at the time though. I thought I’d escaped it. That all those years of meditation practise and internal work and self awareness had clipped the wings of it.
I was, apparently, mistaken. It took a few weeks for the idea to bed in before, in the midst of the night, an angry ghost screeched into my face and left my nervous system to go and quietly shit itself in the corner.
Of course, I mean angry ghost in a figurative sense. If an actual ghost had awoken me in the midst of the night, it would have been me shitting myself in bed and not my nervous system.
A couple of challenges came up for me during the past few weeks. There’s been a lot to consider. I’m a member of the “no marriage, no kids” club, which on one hand offers me a lot of personal freedom. The other side of the coin, however, is that I can’t draw on a notion of family to create any sense of meaning. I wondered if I was going to be that guy who dies in his sleep in his armchair at 60 only to be eaten by his cats. Plural.
There’s no safety net to any of this. I’m free-styling all the way not entirely sure what direction I’m going in. So far everything’s worked itself out in a weird “the universe abides” kind of way. But what if it didn’t?
After a couple of weeks of pondering, drinking whisky, and pacing around my house in a blue dressing gown, I arrived at a realisation.
It doesn’t matter. I am, ultimately, quite content where I am, and I have only arrived at that place due to the choices and the fate of my past. So that means there’s nothing “bad” about any of it. Just things that happened that led me to this moment. I had to remember to be in this moment, and not spiral into history.
I also had to give myself a bit of compassion (there’s that word again) and stop thinking I’m a therapist/buddhist/whateverthefuck, I should be able to handle this. Guess what David? You’re a human being and you’re gonna feel stuff that’s uncomfortable. It’s OK. And if you could also stop talking to yourself in the second person that would be grand.
Worrying about the past does nothing because I can’t change it. Worrying about the future does nothing because I can change it.
And if I end up being eaten by cats, so be it. I’ll be dead anyway and at least it’ll put me to good use one last time.
Much love
David