I don't feel like I've been doing much with my spare time for a while. Development generally consists of exciting and painful growth phases followed by rest and recuperation phases, but this year+ hibernation I'm crawling out of may have been a bit excessive. I have many times thought how nice it would be to have a time or suspended animation machine that would let me wake up 50 years, time having neatly dealt with all my little problems by serenely passing them by. To procrastinate then, is to be a frustrating mix of wise and foolish: wise enough to know all of our problems fade to insignificance with the passage of time but foolishly succumbing to the temptation to do nothing, hoping there will be enough time on our personal clock after to do something else or perhaps resting lightly in the delusion that maybe I, for the first time in history, will turn out to be immortal. The singularity is right around the corner you know! Or perhaps Jesus. Or maybe the Buddha or Odin or Allah? Who can give me immortality? Is it Ra, god of the sun? I can be in Egypt by morning. I have a lot of procrastinating to do and I need more time to do it.
Of course, the universe is not required to play along with my delusions so I remain obstinately mortal and procrastination, by any definition, is still more or less just wasting my own time. Moreover, the universe, obstinately unconcerned with my hopes dreams and personal and psychological well-being, moves on and moves objects and people as it will and occasionally the little space I've built for myself where I allow myself the delusion of sameness and stability and safety keeps the walls but loses the floor and my dogmatic belief that I can get my shit together if I just float here in sameness long enough gets shattered by the realization that I've been sinking for a while now and if I want to see the sunlight again I'm going to have to get my shit together enough NOW to at least swim for it.
Which is to say, getting one's shit together is a laudable and reasonable aspiration but asking the world to, you know, maybe stop for a while in the meantime is not as much as such. I keep asking the world to stop and it keeps laughing and at some point maybe I should take the hint, you know?
The latest Wile E. Coyote freefall moment was prompted by my partner's request for an open relationship, which truly I never saw coming. It has not been the end of the world, although I initially processed it like it was approaching that, although I believe we have worked through it with an arrangement more or less to my satisfaction and comfort and I believe I have made the best choice of the choices currently available to me. But it has been yet another stark reminder that even people I know well can and will surprise me and that the universe is under no obligation to proceed as I have foreseen it.
There is a form of monogamy, that I often practice, where one is tempted, if not outright encouraged, to believe that what is joined should never be rent asunder and that who I am now is who I must always be and how I feel now is how i must always feel and what I have with another person will always be there for me to take comfort in and I'm convinced that this is maybe not the best version of monogamy out there. It's too tempting to let it slide into personal procrastination where maybe I stop taking care of myself (check) and stop taking care of the other person (sometimes check) because we are committed and we don't have to keep trying so hard to be visibly "mate material" all the time and that what is "good" about it is the eternal commitment and co-dependent attachment of it all.
It seems to me like it must be better to take the world as it is, on the only terms it will offer itself to me, and accept that the only constant is change and that a commitment to change together is a fine thing, but the recognition that a given relationship may not work for all parties forever is not such a bad thing, in that it provides incentive to maintain oneself and tend the relationship. So at least if it does end I can take considerable comfort in the knowledge that I was engaged and and kept up my end of the arrangement as best I could and really that's all I can ask of myself in any relationship. This is not at odds with monogamy in theory to be sure, many fine relationships embrace the uncertainty, but it may be at odds with monogamy as frequently practiced, where fear of uncertainty leads to an unrealistic sense of security and procrastination and jealousy and co-dependence. To be in a healthy monogamous relationship then may necessitate recognizing one's partner is tempted by others and is still attracted to others and sometimes wants different things than you and is sometimes a really different person than you but can be trusted to abide by the terms of your relationship (which are there, even if only implied) and can be trusted to come home to you even if someone else merits a lingering glance from time to time. More to the point, letting oneself forget the fickle and chaotic nature of the universe and the people within it leaves one more flat-footed when the rug is inevitably pulled out again.
So to me, at this point, the open relationship is just extending that trust to an admittedly scarier, and admittedly socially controversial degree, of letting the other partner date casually and meet and fuck new people and trusting them to abide by the explicit agreement one might have made about that kind of thing and trusting them to still want to come home to me. The particulars of the agreement are very much specific to the needs of the individuals within the relationship, but what's important is that there is an agreement and a good faith effort to abide by it. Not that it is better than monogamy per se, not that I don't personally have my concerns about the whole endeavor, but I think it's the best fit for us right now and it's been the conclusion of both of us staring at the frightening uncertainty of it all face on, and doing our best to come to terms with it. My partner and I are considerable late bloomers in our own way and I think the relationship had stalled while we both avoided the implications of that. Is an open-relationship the best answer for that? Maybe not, but we don't see another we're happier with at the moment.
I have few beliefs these days, but I do believe in grown adults get to come to their own arrangement in who they love and how they love them and I believe in embracing uncertainty and learning to be nimble in facing life's challenges rather than constantly trying to plant oneself on shifting sand, even though I am objectively terrible at actually being nimble (emotionally or otherwise). So while I am not super thrilled at the wake-up call, I am grateful to once again be attempting to face the world as it is and preparing myself to adjust to the world as it will be. I am grateful to be awake.
And while it's clear I'm still going to struggle with depression and insecurity and self-esteem in the near future, it's becoming clearer once again that procrastination is a habit best left behind me. I keep building safe, unchanging places and getting frustrated when the floor falls out, and building a new eternal delusion, only to have the floor fall out again. And again. And again. Maybe it's time to admit it's just trap doors all the way down and try something new.
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