Driving is a great way to clear your head. Or fill it up with other stuff that's going to send you all kinds of different kinds of crazy.
Here's today's three kinds of crazy.
The Purpose of the Passenger Seat
Doing some errands this afternoon I had the weirdest feeling. I was tempted, as John Mayer would say, to keep the car in drive and leave it all behind.
I just felt like hitting the highway, pushing the car up past 80, which is where the dial was as I headed north on I-85, up to just as fast as I could take it -- swerving in and out of traffic...leaving the city an ever reducing spot in my rear-view, heading into the mountains and watching the sunlight turn from golden to amber and red, the sky turning from blue to pink to purple and finally to black...until the tank runs dry and I have to walk.
Of course, I didn't do that. But for a minute, it was what I wanted to do. As though I could just go, and keep going, until the things in my head couldn't keep up...
And no matter how inviting a prospect that appears to me, sometimes it's good that the things I'd so like to escape sit right there in the passenger seat next to me, a reminder that the things I'd like to leave behind can't get out of a speeding car, so maybe I ought to just slow it down for a minute.
Blame
When Jen and I...when I left...it was especially hard for Jen, and she asked some of friends who were ours (though only mine through marriage) to remove me from their Facebook friends list. This wasn't a petty act. It was the act of a woman who didn't want to see what the man who'd promised to love her forever was doing, now that he'd taken that promise back.
Those friends stopped getting my updates, and I've only recently reached out to them -- not to try to recover the friendship that I believe we once shared, but to let them know that I still care about Jen, and that I'm trying to find a way for Jen to trust me again.
It's like trying to move a giant rock in a muddy field using only a pole. The bigger the pole, or the more people you have exerting effort, the more easily the rock will move. I have obstacles, as far as I can tell, to me forgiving myself -- one of them is that...well...sometimes in the past, Jen behaved in a way that made me feel belittled, unimportant, incapable, wrong all of the time, and a whole bunch of other destructive and negative things. None of that excuses my behavior. Let me make that clear. But...today, for whatever reason, I needed Jen to acknowledge her part in the difficulties of our relationship in a way that would help me move the stone. And in a brief conversation this evening, she did. It was all I needed to know. That the things that led to our breakup weren't exclusively things I did.
Blame is a terrible thing, especially when you turn it on yourself. It makes forgiveness so much harder. I was way more at fault than Jen in this thing going wrong, but I wasn't the only one who screwed up. Sharing the responsibility for what happened, unloading even a little of the burden I've been carrying by insisting it was all me, was never going to allow me to forgive myself. Because until I put that burden on Jen, I couldn't forgive her, and if I couldn't forgive her, how could I forgive myself.
Odd, I know. Like writing a list of things you've done so you can cross them off and feel good about having done things. But sometimes the brain and heart don't work ignore logic.
Losing Faith
On television, and in the movies, when you have a priest lose their faith, they typically show the poor Father hitting the bottle, being miserable, or angry.
But here's the thing: What I'm experiencing lately, I think, is much closer to what losing faith really feels like. Forsaken. To lose something you thought was unshakable, and to ask where it went, when it's coming back, and what you can do to help that along...and to hear nothing. It's confusing, distressing. It induces panic. It's like the first time you put your head underwater when you're learning to swim.
It's like all these things, and at the same time, there is nothing like it.
In the end, the only way to recover your faith is to keep believing, keep whispering in the dark until you can hear the answers to your prayers. Because it's the receiving equipment, not the transmitting equipment that's faulty, and until we learn to tune to the right frequency, we'll just be listening to static.
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