Diane’s Blog

In my weekly talk with my dad last Sunday, a topic came up that I had hoped would not raise its ugly little head again.  First, let me remind you that my past relationship with my father was always rocky at best — there were times when we did not speak, and in some ways that was a great relief for me. 

 The verbal abuse I experienced from him growing up was something that I carried around with me for many years; it manifested as anger and the need to control others in order to experience what felt to me like safety.  Obviously, this created dysfunctional relationships, and until I hit 40, I blamed others for what I later realized I had created myself. 

 Over the last few years, and to the surprise and delight of both of us, my relationship with my father has healed to the extent that we can actually talk for extended periods of time without getting defensive and/or judging and even attacking the other person in some way.  However, my dad still seems to have the need to reminisce about how “nasty” I was to him in this or that conversation that occurred years ago — the implication being that I had been a very unlikable person until recently, when I somehow “changed my attitude” and turned into nice Diane. 

I have let this go over and over, as I know now that it simply does no good to rehash one’s perceived childhood pain with the aging parent who was involved.  Oh, I tried this a number of times years ago, and was shocked to discover that my father (and mother for that matter) had no memory of any transgression on their part. 

I guess I was in a sort of prickly mood this time, because I found myself resenting being placed in a position of apologizing for something not only dug up from the past, but in this case, a conversation I know did not go as my father describes it.  I suddenly heard myself say, “Well, you know, ours was the only relationship in the last 15 years that was problematic.  Yes, I know I was not particularly nice to you and at times even hung up the phone on you, but there were reasons for that.  You do remember that when I was growing up you did a lot of yelling. I was afraid of you and as I got older, I felt anger towards you for that.  You would call me “stupid” or tell me I needed to see a psychiatrist if I disagreed with you.” 

Needless to say, my father was shocked and horrified.  He has no recollection of any of this, apparently having always believed he was a wonderful father.  I could tell that he was grappling with it; that it could only cause him pain if he were to accept it.  We both fumbled around for a minute or two, until we agreed that the past truly no longer exists.  Since it doesn’t exist, why go there?  We both agreed that we are very very happy with the relationship that we have forged, that we each forgave the other some time ago, and that we don’t want to jeopardize it now. 

The ex-mental health professional as well as the hurt child within has always wanted to force my father to look at what he did and take responsibility for its role  in undermining not only our relationship, but all of mine until the time that I took things into my own hands.  Over a number of years, I successfully managed to exorcise all the old demons.  It took a great deal of time, effort and inner work, and required brutal honesty on my part. 

I know now that I can’t expect a parent to do the same — it’s just not reasonable.  And after all, if we can take it upon ourselves to meet each new moment with acceptance of someone, no matter what our history with them, won’t we be able to see them more clearly than we ever could through the lens of historical pain?  (End of post–please ignore below)

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Before I begin this week’s entry, I want to state that the classes I mentioned in last week’s entry are on hold for now.  For a number of reasons, I will probably not present anything until spring.  So — more on that in a few months.

Having been back from my trip to Cleveland for a couple of weeks now, I am really struck by the connection between travel and perspective.  It seems as though I can go along in the same groove daily — repeating my routines, as it were, almost indefinitely.  But yank me out of that groove, even for a week, and suddenly I am seeing many things more clearly.  I imagine that many of you have had this same experience. 

When we drove up to Cleveland, Jim and I were planning to build a house here in Asheville.  Two weeks later we are planning to move to Massachusetts at that time instead.  What happened?  Change is a funny thing — you have to be ripe for it or it doesn’t happen.  No one can MAKE you change your mind about anything.  That’s nonsense.  But if you already have a million little questions swimming around in your noggin, then all it may take is one whack on the side of that noggin and presto — those questions suddenly coalesce and new awareness pops up. 

 Apparently the questions in my own head had been multiplying over the last few years — questions regarding what I really need in terms of where I live.  Seven days in Cleveland and I know I belong in New England! Realizations happen in just that way, I have found.  The simple act of spending time with a few of my good friends in another city was enough to push me out of denial and face my true needs.  Let’s face it — we are all in denial about various things in our lives.  It’s the American way. 

 We have fears, mostly about change, it can seem much easier to not rock the boat.  The problem is, the nagging questions in the head don’t go away — they get louder over time, and more difficult to suppress.  Sometimes we project them on to something else, so fearful are we of looking at what we really need to thrive.  I thought I had invested so much in my choice to leave Cleveland and be here in Asheville — but the truth is, a couple of very important needs were not being met. 

On our drive home from Ohio, I decided to blurt out to Jim some of my feelings of unhappiness, and I wasn’t too surprised to hear him agree with me.  A few days later, I asked for guidance about how to know where to live among the numerous options we seem to have.  Among other things, I was guided to spend some time thinking about what my needs really are — particularly those which determine where I live. 

This turned out to be extremely helpful; out of six major needs, I have two that are not being met.  At this time in my life, it’s clear to me that I will not be happy allowing one third of my major needs to go unmet.  Sure, there’s plenty of natural beauty, space, and a benign climate here; what there isn’t is: people of my kind (bright, Northern, liberal, irreverent, literate, humorous, compassionate) and a close proximity to culture: museums, plays, etc..  Oh, there are some folks that fit the description I just gave, but not many. 

Mostly this is a Southern culture, and I have never acclimated.  Let me put it this way — hearing country music on the loudspeaker in every single store I walk into here is a form of water torture, and I need to be released.  I realize not all of you will agree with me about that, and that’s as it should be.  It seems to me that at this particular moment on the planet, when we are speeding towards an uncertain but undeniable destiny, one of the most important things we can each do to assure our individual groundedness is to find the geographical spot on which we feel most at home. 

 Look around you — what works for you and what doesn’t work so well?  Is there something you can do about it right now, or within a year or two?  More and more I find that I’m not willing to settle, especially when that means compromising my ability to feel joy on a daily basis.  How about you?

Well, it’s good to be home.  Especially since I just learned that the Great Lakes area, which I visited last week, received a very early snowfall — just four days after I left!

Before I go on to talk about the reunion I attended, an announcement: I will be presenting a class or two in Asheville next month.  I have yet to decide on the main focus, but the top contender at this time is Relationships.  Check back here next week for more information. 

Okay, now for the disappointing news — my 40th class reunion was a bust!  Out of 600 classmates, only 70 attended.  70!  And I didn’t even know the majority of them.  Only two female friends were there, which was something; not one male.  In thinking this over since then, I’ve decided that the best explanation is that a lot of folks attended either the 25th or 35th reunion, found it dull, and vowed to never return — as I did last Saturday night.  The question remains — why did I want to go to this thing anyway? 

After the fact, the answer was different than what I had thought.  Well, sort of different.  It’s still true that I was curious to see where life had led so many of the people I had known, and I wanted to apologize to a few of them, whether or not they knew what the heck I was talking about.  But I also had to admit that I wanted to be seen.  And admired, perhaps. 

I noticed that in general the women looked much better — healthier, younger, more well-preserved — than the men in attendance.  There is still a part of me that can’t seem to get past that superficial need for the kind of attention that being attractive brings with it.  I guess it was unrealistic of me to think I had left that behind entirely, when so much of my earlier life seemed to depend on it for defining who I was. 

This seems to be tied in to the false spiritual understanding that as you evolve spiritually in your life, you get to a point where appearances mean nothing.  Perhaps that will happen some day — I’m not there yet.  And that’s OK.  I’m learning that it’s just as easy to beat yourself up over spiritual success (or lack of it) as any other kind.  I see this all the time in healers around me, and I’m no exception. 

Another revelation was that my desire to see and talk to my high school friends was for the most part sentimental.  And therefore it may have been for the best that I didn’t see them.  The truth about these friends is that they fell away long ago, largely because I let them do so.  Not having a clue as to who I really was back then, I tried to fit in, and found a group of simpatico girls –my “group.”  Around the time of our junior year in college, things started to feel uncomfortable to me — largely due to the fact that I was going in a different direction both socially and politically than these people. 

They were on one side of the Vietnam war debate; I was on the other.  They were on career tracks; I was on the hippie track.  Although we stayed in touch for the next few years and I even roomed with one of them, it became more and more painfully clear that we had very little in common.  We drifted apart and I never looked back.  Well maybe a little.  Again, for sentimental reasons. 

You really can’t go home again, and that’s the truth. Too often we let what we think “ought to be” guide us.  That never works in the long run.  Childhood and adolescence are a time of seismic change, and we will never feel again the way we did then.  Some wish they could go back — there is no back — it no longer exists.  I don’t want to go back — perhaps I had hoped to glean a little more understanding of those tumultuous years, when Diane was such an unknown element.  Fortunately I don’t have a “need” to do that.  Right now feels better and better to me.

The other night I was watching The Dr. Phil Show which featured a face-off between a young, attractive woman in her 30s and a man of about the same age, an attorney.  The young man, who is African-American, is bringing a lawsuit against the woman who runs a revenge-oriented web site for women who feel they’ve been treated badly by males. 

 The gist of the tale is that more than one woman posted their complaints about this particular man.  Each of them cited a different problem, ranging from asserting that he is actually gay to alleging that he has herpes and did not inform them.  His real name was used and a picture of him posted.  This man argues that not only are these allegations untrue but that they could cost him dearly in terms of future employment, if any potential employer should “Google” his name on the Internet and turn this information up. 

Both he and Dr. Phil made numerous attempts to get this woman to say that she at least understands his predicament; she did not.  In fact, she asserted repeatedly that she has absolutely no responsibility for any of the information posted on her web site.  This is what her lawyer told her.  It is apparently her main defense. 

 None of us except the man filing the lawsuit can know where the truth lies, but where does the responsibility for posting this information line?  It’s a question that’s has been intriguing and bothering me a little ever since.  As the plaintiff pointed out, having this information posted on a web site is very different from seeing it in print elsewhere — on the Web,  it could be there forever. 

 Isn’t this a familiar refrain?  It seems that everywhere I go these days I run into people or organizations or institutions who believe they are being victimized, and they take no personal responsibility for the actions on their part that led to their victimization.  If no one is responsible, how will we ever resolve our differences?  Perhaps even more important, how will we evolve spiritually?  Because evolution of the spiritual kind, which as far as I’m concerned is the most important kind, only occurs when we each make the choice to take responsibility for every word and every action that we put out there. 

I know about this first-hand because I didn’t begin to take responsibility for my actions until I was 40 years old.  Until then I blamed everything and everyone around me for my unhappiness, and that meant that I was dependent on change to occur from the outside rather than how it actually happens — from the inside out.  The wonderful bonus for me (and everyone around me, I’m sure) was that as soon I began to say “I guess I created that”, I stopped feeling victimized.  Who knew? 

 It’s as if we’re being asked to take responsibility now on the global level — anything less seems to be resulting in egos clashing, people dying, and situations becoming worse rather than healing.  While it is certainly possible that the woman appearing with Dr. Phil has the law on her side, I keep wondering where is her sense of moral or ethical responsibility for the space that she occupies on the Web?  Multiply her web site by just a thousand and imagine the possible consequences. 

I had to make a decision a number of years ago that I feel relates to this issue.  When I receive spiritual guidance from a higher source, it doesn’t feel as if it’s coming from Diane.  Many times I don’t even know what I have written in answer to a question from a client — I have to read it over after I’ve channeled it.  But I realized at a certain point that if I didn’t take responsibility for the words I am writing, who could?  Spirit?  I don’t think so.  Although that would be nice…

As I thought about this topic, I laughed, suddenly recalling a review of Stanley Kubrick’s final movie, “Eyes Wide Shut.”  The reviewer said this movie seems to have been written by someone who hasn’t been out of the house for 35 years, to paraphrase.  These days it sometimes feels like it would be safer to stay in, doesn’t it?  I certainly empathize with people who have agoraphobia. 

Intellectually I know there’s nothing to fear outside the relative haven of my home.  So why do I breathe a sigh of relief almost every time I return home and close the door behind me?  I don’t buy into the propaganda–ish statements made by politicians with agendas.  They tell me it’s not safe out there because the world is now full of people who want to do me harm.  Huh uh.  One thing I know for certain is that we create our own reality according to our beliefs, so if it’s a dangerous world you believe in, a dangerous world is what you’ll experience — it really is that simple. 

How do I know?  Because I’ve tested this universal law over and over in the living laboratory that is Diane’s daily life.  Observation over many years tells me we really do experience what we expect to come our way.  Of course, there are mitigating circumstances, and it can also take time — sometimes a lifetime — to manifest what our beliefs dictate.  But proof is with us daily if we bother to look around, that life is one big, hairy self-fulfilling prophecy.  Or as Dr. Wayne Dyer says, “Believing is seeing.” 

So if I’m not afraid, what has kept me in my house for so much of my adult life?  Yes, I’m a bit of a hermit.  As an only child, aloneness is comfortable for me, not lonely.  But I also know part of me wants to be with people to exchange ideas, feel supported, and just enjoy being social, dammit!  When I lived in Cleveland I went out almost every weekend, but I had a “best friend” then.  For some selfish reason she couldn’t just pick up and move to Asheville in 2000 when I came here. 

And, yes, I got married over a year ago, but hey — I married another only child!  So far we’ve spent most of our time as a cozy twosome, but we’re both starting to suspect there may be a bigger world out there.  There’s a reason that home theaters and computers are so popular — more and more of us are choosing to stay in the house.  We don’t even talk on the phone as often, and don’t try to tell me we’ve “replaced” verbal interaction with e-mail or text messaging.  If you believe that one, maybe you also equate intimacy with having sex? 

The sad thing is, I know in my heart that one of the keys to a world at peace is more of us going out there and mingling.  Now there’s a non-threatening word.  I’m determined to go out there and do some major mingling.  I have a hunch that it could lead to higher-level interaction, even.  Ultimately I want to feel “at home” anywhere I happen to be.  After all, I know our only true “safety” and “security” comes from becoming congruent — that place where finally, our outsides match our insides.  Well, gotta go out for a walk — the rain’s letting up and I’m feeling the need to mingle — if only with a few neighborhood doggies, for starters.

On Monday of this week Jim and I visited his daughter Kara, who lives about 45 minutes from us.  She is a lovely, complicated, endearing 22 year old who I am delighted to have in my life, never having had children of my own (that I know of).  We get along famously, but every now and then I suddenly feel like I’m 85 years old, for God’s sake.  Don’t get me wrong — she never intends this response, but there it is, all the same.  What’s the demon that rears its ugly head? 

Technology — plain and simple.  This is the dividing line between generations now, as I see it.  When I was her age it was the “generation gap”; code for our rebellion against the old guard’s societal attitudes.  Now I ARE the old guard, and I will not go quietly.  Here’s the latest of numerous incidents: I just realized this sounds a little disgusting, so try not to get grossed out.  I was sitting in Kara’s living room, talking and idly running my hand over the nape of my neck when I felt a bump at my hairline.  “Hey — look at this — does this look like something?”  I asked Jim and Kara.  Well, her first impulse was not to run over and look, but to pick up her digital camera.  “Here, I’ll take a picture of it!”  She said.  I’m sitting there thinking, “What good is that?  What’s she going to do — mail it to me?  By then it’ll either be gone or I’ll be dead.” 

What I actually said was more like, “Huh?”  She grabbed the camera and stood up, saying “You know — I’ll take a picture of it, then we can zoom in on it!”  I forgot — Digital.  No waiting.  Zooming in AFTER you shoot.  Egad.  So that’s what we did, and it looked harmless in close-up; at least I’m not in a coma yet. 

I heard a segment on National Public Radio the other day about how this is the first generation that knows more than their parents about everything technological.  And with every new advance, we lose ground.  I don’t doubt the truth of this for a minute.  But the question is — does this mean we have nothing to offer these children of the post-information age?  Should we just throw up our hands and wheel ourselves off into the Sunset Retirement Home? 

Happily, I do know the answer to that one.  Hell, no!  There is something which is at the same time the most valuable gift my generation has to offer and also among the least valued by this society.  If you said “advice”, you’re close.  Personally, I have finally learned this about advice — nobody wants it; they just say they do.  So it’s not that.  What they do want is answers about life’s challenges, e.g. “How do I get out of THIS one?” “Why do I get so depressed about things?” 

Life experience is the only way for young people to feel that they are okay, but they don’t have nearly enough of it yet, and the world they live in is so much more demanding and fast-paced and cynical than the one we knew.  We can share our experience with them.  But there’s a catch — you can’t provide helpful examples of how you got through something unless you gain some perspective over the years, because chances are you screwed up at their age, too.  I know I did. 

So it’s only now — now that I have a sensitive young woman in my life who is so like me at her age it’s uncanny — that I realize how far I’ve come.  15 years ago I was still struggling with my own identity.  In the interim I looked within and worked at letting go of my need to judge, my inability to forgive, and my mistaken identification with the ego’s idea of who Diane is rather than with my heart’s knowledge. 

Now I’m able to say to Kara, “Well, sweetie, I did the same thing when I was your age.  I got into trouble for it, and I lost some friends.  I finally learned that I’m okay just as I am, and I don’t have to pretend to like what everybody else does just to keep their friendship.”  Or whatever the topic is — you get the idea.  I’ve also learned to add something my parents rarely, if ever, gave me — unsolicited cheerleading.  Maybe it’s BECAUSE I didn’t receive it that I value it so now, but whenever I can I add, “You are such a fabulous person.  I know you don’t see it that way yet, but you will.  Some day you’ll look back on these days and wonder how you could possibly have underestimated yourself so.” 

Don’t we all need to hear that more than we need to know how to use an MP3 player?  Interesting, isn’t it, that we still choose, as a culture, to place the public “achievement” (almost always in terms of dollars) above personal triumph over old, dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors?

For most of my life I had a fickle relationship with practicality.  Or at least with my beliefs about its meaning to me.  I wasn’t conscious of this and so I got into a lot of trouble along the way, blaming everyone else for my unhappiness and misfortunes. I remember being expected to choose a major for college and being stumped.  If I had allowed myself to believe in following the desires of the heart, I would have chosen theater or dance.  Instead I chose home economics — I hear you snickering out there — in the 60’s this was still considered a viable choice for “young ladies.” 

Within a year it was the “Summer of Love” — 1967 — and my world was flipped on its head.  The rebellious impulses on which I had begun to act rather meekly in my freshman year went into overdrive and my grades suffered accordingly.  I dropped out halfway through my senior year.  Hey — I didn’t need that piece of paper, man!  I was so Mary Tyler Moore meets Janis Joplin — a truly half-assed, reluctant hippie who still had not a clue about who she really was — but now I felt empowered in my cluelessness.  Wasn’t I part of a movement? In other words, I still had a very unhealthy relationship with practicality.  The only difference was that now, instead of completely buying into my parent’s notion of what’s practical I completely rejected that same notion. 

 Hello!  I couldn’t see that I wasn’t following my own blueprint — or rejecting it.  I was rebelling against an image of myself that had been projected onto me by people who thought they knew who I was–or should be.  No one, least of all me, realized how far off we all were. I was 40 years old before I began to suspect that my life was little more then a continual allergic reaction to other people’s vision of me, particularly what was “practical” for me.  How can we make smart choices for ourselves if we aren’t on intimate terms with our own deepest needs?  With our true intentions?  Yet I talk to people every day who never seem to check in with their own gut feeling — or, having checked in, refuse to honor it.  Why?  It always seems to be a variation on “Not practical.”

If we truly are at least as much Spirit as we are matter, can we afford to live our lives as though these vital impulses of our heart are anything less than practical?  If they aren’t, then who IS driving our car?  Have you ever suddenly just KNOWN something is wrong but you ignored that knowing and persisted in acting on what your head told you to do, only to later regret that betrayal of your own inner wisdom?  (Yes–my first marriage, but that’s another story…)

I have a feeling that if we each decided to expand our definition of “practical” to include our gut reactions, within a year we would have successfully steered this planet in a much healthier direction.  I know, I know — that would require a leap of faith because most of us still accept the consensus reality that the ego voice is the ultimate authority.  What if it turns out to be the other way around?  What if our own personal inner guidance system, driven by our intuitive voice is actually the smarter CEO?  What do you think?  Isn’t it time we try something different?

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My parents expected to age as their parents did — retire, find a hobby to help you kill whatever time you have left until your health takes a nose dive; then you croak.  The main difference being that their generation had the new, improved version of aging — it lasts longer — so now you find yourself raising puttering and dawdling to an art form, while stoically avoiding any mention of the “D” word.

For a while there, my parents played out their expectations with a certain flair, if not gusto.  My father, true to his own hermit-like inclination, spent the first 20 years of his early retirement hanging around the house.  He did manage to go outdoors long enough to take my mom on a few vacations, which turned out to be a plus, since it gave her a chance to visit non–Ohio parts of the country before she died in 1994.

My dad entered a difficult period of grieving, but then a strange thing happened: He noticed that he was single.  He decided to take advantage of this unexpected turn of events.  He was only 70, and still youthful.  Waitresses everywhere flirted with him.  And so he stepped off the path that had been laid out for him so long ago by HIS parents.  He started to reclaim some of the adolescent verve that had been left on a closet shelf to fade and die. 

He placed an ad in the “personals” of his local newspaper (shaving a few years from his age.)  He jumped into the dating ritual that he had largely missed in his youth and found a couple of agreeable companions along the way.

That was 12 years ago.  At 83, my father has now re-evaluated the beliefs and attitudes of a lifetime and thrown out much of what he now sees wasn’t healthy for him or anyone around him.  In this he has joined me in breaking away from the “Hausler heritage” of holding on to all your grudges for, well — forever.  At any given moment, fully half of the Hausler clan (not my mom’s side — they were all Finnish immigrants whose days were filled with heroic attempts to utter at least every other word of their “English” recognizably) would have banished the offending “others,” and sides tended to shift and morph in ways that confounded logic and left me scrambling for the nearest exit.

Frankly, I am still amazed and downright giddy at the thought of what he accomplished.  My father was a verbal abuser, controller,  and rage-aholic throughout my formative years.  Our relationship had always been strained — a few times even broken.  In the last few years, that rift has healed.  Now we talk and laugh and even forgive each other for the pain we inflicted over the last half-century.

How could he have the beat such odds?  My theory is that sometimes it takes a disaster of gigantic proportions to shake a person free from the private hell they constructed long ago to keep them “safe.”  My mother’s death was that freeing disaster.  Suddenly everything was up for grabs.  And if that wasn’t enough, the Universe threw in a little prostate cancer and an angioplasty for good measure in recent years.

We will all experience losses as we age.  I am so grateful to have a living role model for not only surviving those losses, but transcending them.  Thanks, Dad.  I love you.  You have been my greatest teacher.

I have a high school reunion coming up in October, and I’m shocked at how eager I am to attend.  It’s not as though I haven’t seen these people since graduation; I went to both the 10th and 20th gatherings.  They decided to hold a 25th, but at the time I was too fragile, having just left my first husband a month earlier.  Did they even hold a 30th?  If so, someone left my name off the list, and I think I know who (just kidding–no I’m not).  And now — it can’t be — but it is: the 40-year reunion of Lakewood High in Lakewood, Ohio, where I was born and grew up. I remember being surprised at all the people who flocked in from all over the country at those earlier reunions; now I’ll be one, having moved to Asheville in 2000. 

The reunion committee sent me a list of events and a questionnaire.  I’m sorry to report that I won’t be attending the Friday night informal get-together at a local bar, although I love the concept; it feels so surreal, like a David Lynch movie: An increasingly snockered and rowdy bunch of 58-year-old pre-retirees finally getting up the nerve to vent all that button-down, savage emotion that until now had been semi-successfully repressed.  Spotty-faced, hormone-driven angst erupting intact from the the aging lips of somebody’s grandparent:  “I always hated you, Susie!”   ”You were so hot, Kenny, and I bet you didn’t even know it!”  Spouses backing out of the place to get some air…

Okay, I admit, part of the reason I am not going to expose myself thus is that I could all too easily be one of those characters, verbalizing what I’ve only fantasized I’d say if I had the nerve.  I already know how that turns out, thank you, having made what turned out to be the stupendously unwise choice of calling a high school boyfriend after my divorce–way too soon after my divorce.  Do you know how these things go from personal experience?  Well, perhaps your attempt at re-ignition went well.  Mine, sad to say, went very, very badly.  Not immediately, mind you, although there were signs early on, such as the fact that he went into a sort of hellfire and brimstone rant in the middle of the pizza parlor on our first, er, “date.” Should I have read my inability to get out of bed most of the next day from exhaustion as a clue?

No, I’ll save my one-night-only appearance for Saturday night — the actual reunion “dinner/dance.”  I finally unearthed the origin of my desire to show up this time: two reasons, apparently.  One — I can think of three people to whom I owe apologies.  Suddenly, at this point in my life, such things carry weight.  Thirty years ago, when another boyfriend asked at our 10th reunion, “Why did you take so-and-so to the dance during prom week instead of me?”  I had nothing.  Nothing but some flippant, dismissive excuse.  They say what goes around comes around, and so I experienced real déjà vu when I found myself asking of the “brimstone” ex-boyfriend years later, “Why did you cheat on me senior year?”  I received the same type of response I had given when asked at that 10th reunion. 

I know now that even though we grow up and move on the old wounds don’t necessarily heal completely.  And so I plan to revise my original answer this time, and apologize to two other classmates as well.  It doesn’t even matter if they brush it off — it’s something I have to do so that I can feel a little lighter. Sometimes personal growth means we do what’s necessary to ease our conscience — and we do it more for ourselves than for anyone else.  That’s not selfish, it’s part of bringing our life back into harmony.  Calling back parts of our lesser-evolved self from whereever we let them stray, and forgiving them, because we now know they did the best they could at the time.

The second reason I’m attending this hoedown is curiosity.  It strikes me as very telling that I went to those earlier reunions to see certain people, but largely to be seen.  “How do I look now?” was my refrain, which I now understand stemmed from my low opinion of who Diane was. The questionnaire says, “What have you been doing with your life?”  Tell me instead, “Where has life taken you?” and “Where have you gone that you didn’t expect to go?”  These are the questions I would ask anyone who has lived for one half a century.  and did ask, often, when I was a social worker specializing in gerontology.  Every last one of us is on a unique journey, no matter how mundane it may look from the outside.  It’s always a journey of the soul.  And, as I have elsewhere quoted Pierre Tielhard de Chardin as saying, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.  We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Come back for Part Two sometime in October, after the reunion.  I can hardly wait to see what scenic routes some of those souls have traversed.  I know this–it won’t be boring.

Earlier this week, during a visit with my friend Ken and his twenty-something daughter, the two of them recounted the blow-up that finally ended his second marriage.  Back then he had not yet developed the degree of self-respect needed to end an abusive relationship early on.  His wife had always been verbally abusive, but this time she crossed the line and grabbed her stepdaughter by the throat.  Ken had to separate them; it got uglier; Ken and his daughter walked out for good.

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