Things I Learned in the Fire (a letter to myself)
You knew better, John. You forgot what you knew. You allowed yourself to be seduced by Tiff and her charm and you let your guard down.
You know you needed someone growth-oriented.
Intelligent? Yes, you need someone who will captivate your intellect. Wicked smart? Fo’ shure.
But even more, you need someone growth-oriented, a spiritual warrior-princess, a woman who is courageous—courageously self-aware, who thinks about herself and her life courageously and honestly and realistically, and not defensively or immaturely. A woman who doesn’t use a lot of psychological softeners, a woman who is not overly-sensitive, who has been pampered too much emotionally, an emotional hothouse flower, someone who floods easily emotionally.
You don’t want someone with an avoidant personality, someone who emotionally spooks easily, who is skittish and flighty. You want someone who embraces challenges, difficulties, who is a lover of truth, reality, growth, not someone who automatically, reflexively, reactively opts for comfort, low stress, low tension, the path of least resistance, and sells out on herself (or sells out others) and makes fragile truces, auctioning off parts of herself, in order to try and stick to what is easiest and least tense and least difficult.
You know this. You knew this. You just forgot it. You just forgot to apply it. You were out of practice. Or you just took it for granted that that she wasn’t weak and avoidant and namby-pamby. I mean, after all, she was into you, and there’s nothing about you that comes across as easy or unchallenging or un-intense. And everything else was so good, fit so well, so why question it? Why not go with it?
Well, because of what’s happened; that’s why.
It’s clear now that she got in over her head with you; you were too much for her; being with you was too intense, too overwhelming. She couldn’t keep up with you, she couldn’t play her side of the relationship cleanly with you on the other side of the net. The pressure, the moment kept getting to her, getting the best of her, and she kept caving—on herself and on you, yo-yoing you around, crashing into you and then sling-shotting you away.
You have to more carefully vet your matches. You have to see how they will hold up under pressure, how they deal with difficulty, tension, intense situations. You need a spiritual warrior-princess who embraces challenge, difficulty, intimacy, self-awareness, self-examination, who’s not afraid of living the difficult questions. And who has already read some decent books, not just some pop-psych or Oprah book club blather.
And remember: you will always see more into others than they will see into you. That’s just the way it is. So if another isn’t willing to penetrate you, or penetrate your writing (she said my writing was too intense for her to fully penetrate; so it was water down the drain, or it was written over her head emotionally, it was more than she could comprehend and bear emotionally at her present level of differentiation and emotional self-development [which may well be fairly low; she may be like most of the rest, a Lilliputian]), if another isn’t able to make you REAL to herself, then forget getting into a relationship with her. Move on. Or Californicate with her a few times, take what meager scrap life is offering you, and then move on.
Yes, you could make it work with a weak-willed and uncourageous woman for a while. You know how to handle and charm and woo such people—your past has been filled with such people. But why do it? Because you think that’s all there is that’s out there? That you are alone and that there are no spiritual warrior-princesses out there to meet you where you are and that you can play well with? You need and deserve someone whole. Don’t settle. Anything less will only disappoint you. Anyone less will eventually break and sell you or herself or both of you out.
The fact that you cut through Tiff-Tiff’s bs so quickly and got to the heart of the matter so efficiently is a tribute to you and how fully real you were when you showed up to the relationship.
How could things ever play out well and meaningfully with someone who is such an emotional milquetoast, someone so skittish and uncourageous? How could things play out well with someone with so little tolerance for challenge, difficulty, tension, reality, discomfort, dissonance, truth, real growth? There’s no real growth possible—NONE—on the path of least resistance, the path of avoidance, the path of petty self-protectiveness.
She said she needed to go it alone (solitude) in order to get her bearings, do some inner work, and become more so that she could meet you where you are and where you deserve. All of which sounds nice and plausible (if not a little more than a very flattering version of the “it’s not you, it’s me” approach to breaking up). But it’s a cop-out. The two options—getting to know you better, and getting to know herself better and doing her inner work—aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, they would have probably worked very well together and dove-tailed rather nicely, even synergistically.
But her thinking isn’t that courageous and honest, though it is that developed. She doesn’t apply her top-notch thinking across the board with integrity, honestly and rigorously. Instead she thinks well at work, but sloppily in her relationships and when she gets under interpersonal pressure.
The prognosis for her in terms of her genuinely growing is likely not good. If she can’t handle you, what makes her think that she can handle the books that you read and that have resonated deeply with you? It makes no sense … she is going to close herself off to you, a living breathing book, full of life, a book that she can interact with her and that can respond to her, and instead she is going to try to read many of the same books you read ten years ago, books that honestly everyone should read in their 20’s and early 30’s—books by Peck, Fromm, Rilke, Schnarch, Krishnamurti, Williamson, et cetera—books that you read when you transformed your psyche (or when your psyche was transformed for you) —?? Except she will read these books without any real give and take. Yes, you had no one around when you read them, but the difference is you wanted to meet someone who had read the same books, you were open, welcomed the challenge and the feedback. But she isn’t. So she is closing herself off to you and instead opting for books that she will more or less misunderstand, water-down, butcher, bastardize, intellectually warp and corrupt, books with whom she will not have the intense and honest and rigorous inner conversations that would naturally accompany a true reading of the books … the trying on for size of what the author has written about … “do I do that?” … “am I guilty of that also?” … “is that true of me?” … she will evade the guilt and shame and embarrassment of seeing herself and her little psychological ploys and immaturities in print staring her back in her face. She will play her little games with these books, just like she played her little games of self-protection and avoiding intimacy and avoiding reality with you.
Why?
Because there will be no intellectual accountability in her reading and her thinking and her inner work. There’s no intellectual accountability in her Buddhist dabblings and her meditation. Reality is whatever her perception is and whatever is comforting to her and “feels” right. She doesn’t understand that reality and truth are uncomfortable, and that comfort isn’t an adequate measure of anything relevant; if anything, the intensity and level of discomfort would be a better gauge of actual growth. Right now, she’s in an intellectual free-for-all of bad faith. Weapons being lent to a thief. And as for her Buddhist friend & sagely mentor? Likely just throwing her soft-pitches. Just giving more blankies to her ego. I mean if Tiff-Tiff is the way she is now under the sagely guidance of this so-called wise and enlightened friend of hers, and the idea of embracing difficulty is still such a novel idea to her and still so foreign to her, then she’s being pampered and soft-pitched and treated with kid gloves in that relationship.
Ditto for her relationship with the therapist she saw on the downside of her marriage and that she continues to see on occasion … another comfortable and unchallenging relationship.
Altogether, I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t startle us and grab our attention like a blow to the head, then why bother reading it? So it can make us happy? For God’s sake, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all! Books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, write for ourselves. What we need are books that affect us like a disaster, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves. We need books that make us feel like we’ve been banished into a forest far from everyone, books that hit us like the suicide of someone near to us. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. —Kafka
Fortunately, the books she’s reading (if she’s even reading them! —which I doubt she is) are not safe books. They are some of the most dangerous books. So there is always an outside chance, a very anomalous and remote and razor slim chance, that something might awaken or deeply change within her, that she might actually become more courageous. I mean, how will she be able to warp Krishnamurti and twist his words into something comforting and unchallenging? Maybe she thinks she’s safer with those books because they can’t answer her back and or won’t be as direct with her as I am. Good luck with that, Tiff…. The only safe way to read those books is to not read them in the first place, or to read the with incredible intellectual dishonesty.
Bottom line: probably no less than about 90% of personal growth involves making oneself more courageous and open. And, John, you have to be with someone who is firmly on that path as well, who is fiercely committed to becoming more courageous, and who lives that, and whose life demonstrates that, especially in her inner world, her relationships, and her self-knowledge. You have to be with someone who is fiercely committed to always being her best with you at any given moment, to playing her side of the relationship with beauty and courage, and if she falters or loses her focus or starts making unforced errors, then she owns up to it, and corrects it, and doesn’t run away like an emotional child in an adult body and hide out behind simplistic, avoidant, either/or thinking.
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Most people turn their solutions to what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us.
—Rilke
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Not to see many thing, not to hear many things, not to permit many things to come close—the usual word for this instinct of self-defense is “taste.” It commands us to say No not only when Yes would be more selfless, but also to say No as rarely as possible—that is, to separate oneself from anything that would make it necessary to keep saying No. In all of these matters—in the choice of nutrition, of home, of climate, of recreation, of relationship—an instinct of self-preservation issues its commandments. When defensive expenditures, be they ever so small, become the rule and the habit, they entail an extraordinary and entirely superfluous and unnecessary impoverishment. Warding off, not letting things come close, involves an expenditure—let nobody deceive himself about this—energy wasted on negative ends. Having quills is a waste, when one can choose not to have quills but open hands.
—Nietzsche
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Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you?
—Rilke
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View all problems as challenges. Look upon negativities that arise as opportunities to learn and to grow. Don’t run from them, condemn yourself, or bury your burden in saintly silence. You have a problem? Great. More grist for the mill. Rejoice, dive in, and investigate.
—Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, “Mindfulness in Plain English“
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Adversity introduces a man to himself. —unknown
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Adversity doesn’t just reveal character, it shapes it. —unknown
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If only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become that which we most trust and find most dependable.
—Rilke
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Those who lack courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
—Albert Camus
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