Finding Strength of Will

Got an email from a friend this week and I wasn’t sure how to reply. You’d think it would be easy. Something simple would suffice, like: “I wish I were there to go with you. Sounds like a lot of fun.” But for some reason I found it difficult to say even that. Here’s why. We’ve been friends for a long time now. Since our first teenage years. We were friends by nature of a mutual friend first, but over time our own friendship grew. He was quiet and reserved, introverted. He like to have things just so. His room was always in order and he paid attention to the details but without getting bogged down by them. He seemed to know what he liked and what he didn’t like without much hesitation. All quite different from me. My room would go through fitful bouts of cleanliness and disarray. My likes and dislikes related much more directly to my mood rather than to any empirical method of elimination of less appealing options. Even my favorite color varied from day to day. He and...

Over the last week or so I have found myself thinking of and even saying to Will that I wish we could go back to the way things were. Not, that I really want that, but this new path is a bit scary and in a lot of ways uncomfortable.   I have heard Will say quite a few times over the last little while that he is so far out of his comfort zone that he doesn’t even   remember where it is anymore.   I didn’t think much about my wishing things to go back until I was talking with someone Sunday night and they said at this point many wives try and pull their husband’s back. I thought about that for a few minutes then and I was thinking about it again today. I have NO desire to go back to the ways things were. Was it safer?   Perceivably, but not necessarily. Will was getting tired of hiding such a big part of him.   Was it more comfortable? Maybe, but it was preventing us from having as close of relationship that we have now; no secrets, no elephants in the room, a...

Thinking about what it means to see things as they really are.  Much of my energy in life has been spent trying to make things be what I think they should be.  This has mostly been in the form of attempting to control other's perceptions of me, or alter my perception of myself.  For many years I thought I could actually change myself, change who I was, or change some aspect of me simply by altering what I liked and what I didn't like.  What I've learned is that it is simultaneously much more complex and much more simple.  It is complex in that it is impossible for me to understand all of the interactions of emotion, desire, needs, feelings, and thoughts resulting from even the smallest thought.  Yet it is much more simple in that each thought, feeling, desire, emotion, and need may be simply just what it is. Today I said simply, "I love you" to a friend.  More of an acquaintance, really, but I understand somewhat of the challenges that are facing him...