Puzzling Emotional Connection

Q: Why do you make such a big deal about why I like you? As you realize its not easy.

A: It's a puzzle and I like puzzles. I like to plumb the nature and properties of relationships, my own especially. I like to dance around the edges of givens, not to automatically challenge their existence, but to sharpen the questions about them. I enjoy the dance we do. Because I do not feel any danger to my own existence, and I pose no danger to yours, I can have and express any feelings I choose. Since you seem to me generally so unmoved by my remarks, minimally affected by them, I can explore what ever comes up. My responsibility, as I understand it, is to distinguish between objective facts about you and your actual assertions, and everything else I might feel or think.

I am in the midst of learning to engage emotionally with other people in ways that are personally meaningful and safe for all involved, and I have endeavored - you may be the judge of my success - to own my stuff, to project gently and without offense, what I perceive may be true. This is an art in all cases, for me at least, but in the case of our relationship, certain key tensions, that are built in, raise the challenge level.

How much me and how much you? Perhaps neither, but the chemistry of how we interact. I am not easy to like, as you say, but since the episode following the work on the deck and siding, I have not cared. For me, liking you is not easy, but it is interesting. You can decide you do not like me, and I would lose a foil for exploring feelings and ideas, for calibrating my language in terms of effective communication, a foil which demands that I expand beyond my normal conception of things. All of which I like and would miss, but is not necessary for my survival.

Sometimes I feel you are responding to me as if I am a crazy, and not to be taken completely seriously. Although not a preferred response from you, I enjoy the challenge of probing you to see what would reach you and engage you emotionally. This curiosity probably explains why I wonder why you like me.

There is no reason to deny a certain "father factor", in that you do remind me of my father in many ways. There is a huge key difference - you are not intentionally cruel, you actually wish me well - which I appreciate enormously. But some of what remains feels like a degree of emotional disinterest in the things I regard as important, and therefore of key importance for my personal validation in relation to a father figure, and therefore of great interest to me. Herein lay the rub, because further probing would reveal contradictions and confusion, because at any deeper layer of feelings I am no longer talking about my relationship with you, but with my father, and the feelings of abandonment that I have in relation to him. With you, at the not-so-deep level, I can remain disinterested too. But it is a cunning disinterest. It is an interested disinterest. It is the disinterest that is interested in the dance at the boundaries of who each of us is.

When I consider your career and your origins, I do not actually expect you to be equipt understand me, or how I think or feel, and how I express myself. I expect you to be baffled by much of what I say. This is part of the puzzle for me - how can I communicate who I am to someone who, it feels to me, doesn’t get me? Who may feel like he gets me but with whom I do not feel that reciprocal sympathy that marks connection? (Someone who, we may say, is unique in my personal constellation of friends in his similarity to my father.) What reaching out beyond the limits of my own mind do I need, to make that connection? Is the hope, the need, even meaningful? Would I be better served by discovering that I feel respected by you at the deep level that I feel the need of, or
by the internal adjustments I make to the feelings of loss I have in relation to my actual father? In the universe of your origins and career, these feelings and thoughts may seem completely a waste of energy, or just a mystery. But I am willing, because I need to, to explore feelings, ideas, perceptions, syntheses, with you, as long as you remain open to reading about them, and responding with the candor I have thus far found.

Tis a fully loaded cart? Yes! Are you having any fun? I hope so. I could stop.

I play, quite seriously, at the boundaries of social consensus, where perhaps I am alone, where I do not always feel substantive, reciprocal sympathy, from which I need to seek the channels of communication between the subjective person I actually find myself to be, and other people who presumably have a subjective existence, because they exist in the objective world around me, but do not respond in a way that is comprehensible to me. Is that me or them, or is it just the chemistry of who we are together? I do wonder.

Answer To A Friend

Q: Do you still live in Springfield and work with that "green peace" outfit?

A: I am fascinated by the memory lapses people have, especially smart people. I am not sure which of my activities got put in the "green peace" category, but if you do not mean the organization Green Peace, which I do not belong to and have never mentioned, then perhaps you would consider my activities as pulling for something that can be called "green peace". Am I correct to sense a certain derogation? Truthfully, I cannot fathom any animosity toward a movement that seeks to preserve the capacity of the earth to support life, since humanity is a form of life and needs "green peace" to survive. The arguments, as I hear them, merely pit short term personal or national survival and wealth against long term universal survival, and I fail to grasp how smart people can be so shortsighted.

You are of interest to me too, as in my mind, and please correct me and forgive me if I am wrong, you are a representative of those interests, of those who esteem the security of wealth more highly than the security of life, who construe security in terms of defenses against hostile parties, and disdain any notion of security that might result from a better distribution of power and wealth. If this is so, if your stands on these issues can be characterized this way, why would you have any interest in me? Our politics are contra-polar. Do you like me despite my politics, and cope with the dissonance by ignoring my arguments or condescending to them? Or perhaps you might like to help me get more interested in that productive work which would advance my personal prosperity - hence distracting me from my politics - , or see me as a son-like figure who - and this is true - could use a father figure to push him in positive directions. I am spinning the fibers of likelihood borne to me by subjective evidence, by inference, not by facts or admission. I wonder if perhaps you actually enjoy the dissonance enough to tolerate the politics, or enjoy my intelligence enough to tolerate the dissonance. I wonder if you would be happier if I suddenly had an awakening, to be reborn into the fold of free-marketeers. I am puzzling over these things and I am happy that you have taken enough interest in me to wend your way across the mine field of my personality. You even dared to ask me about "green peace"! I admire you for that.

Well, being not a possessor of wealth, I have only the more primal vested interest, to create and preserve that environment in which any person can find something to do to self-maintain. In fact, I am so low on the totem pole that I cannot even aspire to personal wealth - my well being depends on the well being of those around me. So not having wealth, the stability of the economy and political environment is important to me for a different set of reasons - and possesses a different look. I am not looking for good locks and a working class that carries the yoke of its labors with docility. I am not seeking a social culture which esteems the ossification of those systems that control wealth while liberating the possessors of wealth to pursue more. Nor am I interested in piping wealth from those who have it to those who do not. My aspiration is for a flexible dynamic system that is sustainable over imaginable time, whose science can say "within our powers of prediction, Earth can support life for indefinite time." (This is not currently true. Within our powers of prediction, Earth's life support systems could fail, and humanity would be the cause of those failures.) My aspiration is for a human social-cultural system that dynamically readjusts to changing conditions and opportunities, and values the health and opportunity for self-maintenance of all systems of life. My aspiration is to make human activity consonant with the sustainability of Earth's life support systems through self-aware, self-adjusting social-cultural processes. I wish for humanity to accept the task of maintaining Earth's life support systems, such as planetary homeostatic mechanisms that keep ozone in the upper layers of the atmosphere, and ecosystems and habitats that maintain particular species of plants and animals, through integration of these values by social-cultural systems, with a minimum of applied police power. Stated as succinctly as I possibly can, I believe that only a full blown ecology of economic activity, in which personal freedom operates responsibly, is sustainable over indefinite time, and to be sustainable over indefinite time, that economic ecology must integrate the values of maintaining Earth's life support systems. This is the bare minimum for me. Anything short of this trends humanity and life toward self-annihilation. My personal well being is of course important to me, but I do not place it outside of the well-being of others, or the well-being of the Earth's own systems. That other people do is unfathomable to me.

Well, none of this has anything necessary to do with you. I have simply used you as a catalyst for plumbing my own feelings about the world and my place in it. So to answer your question, I don't know which "green peace" advocates you mean, but I can assure you that I continue to work for "green peace". I am currently occupied by a responsibility to coordinate production of a series of workshops for Solarfest, an organization that promotes sustainability awareness.

Introduction

___Leaving behind all of the painful mistakes I have made before, I am getting ready to make a few more, right here in full view of anyone who wants to see! I am probably inured to ridicule, having spent my entire life deflecting it, so I am even ready to invite some! Well, only in humor.
___But not every thing here will be humorous. For example, the small text size that is the default in Firefox is not humorous at all. I can barely read what I am typing, and I am quite unhappy with all those young software engineers, and an older one I know, who seem to think that litte tiny letters improve their web sites. Well, just don't program text in pixels, and make the contrast adjustable, and we'll all survive. Please rely on relative scaling whenever possible. All typos and misspellings are hereby attriibuted to poor vision.
___Since this is to be my personal blog, I am making no promises to anyone that I will follow a paricular theme or show any respect to anyone. That is, I am not making promises. Don't be expecting any severe ridicule, either, unless the subject is selfish people. However, if you look at my profile, you will notice that I am mostly interested in relationships, and, not so obviously, consider development of sustainable culture to be my life's work.
___On the subject of relationships, I have been diagnosed as having Asperger's Syndrome, an Autism spectrum disorder, and with ADD or ADHD, the combination of which, combined with dysfunctional parenting, left me incompetent in relationships, hence without the ability to support myself, either. So beginning at the beginning, I read (red) ethnographies to learn about people, and studied human evolution to predict the internal structure of the human being. This strategy was very helpful. Then all I needed was to get 10 years of medications and even more years of therapy to deal with the persistent mental health issues I had. Moreover, I needed to care.
___Asperger's is a condition in which social behavior is not instinctive, but not in which connection with others is unwanted. Untying all of the nots in the last sentence, Aspergers sufferers lack instinctive social skills, but have normal desires for connection, and may possess normal or even exceptions skills of reading emotions of others. But without the instincts to support social connection, they experience exagerated loneliness, and need to make very focused efforts to learn social skills, so they can come out of their loneliness. This is why I am so interested in relationships. As important as they are to everyone, You might need to ask an Aspie to find out just how important they are.
___The meaning of life is experienced through relationships. My sister says that the meaning of life IS relationships, but I believe that the meaning of life is really plural, in fact so multitudinous that counting them would take a lifetime. Good enough we take a lifetime to have them. Anyway, Even fun that seems totally narcissistic, like the elation of coming down a ski slope, depends hugely on the emotional ballast provided by the background experience of human connections. (You get to the bottom of the slope and do what? Put on a poker face because you don't want anyone to know what fun you had??) As someone who has felt absolutely isolated, without any bonds to any other person, I can report that fun isn't much fun without love somewhere. Is the human being that is isolated from all other people able to find meaning? Probably there are examples, but are the rare individuals who are able to live alone actually feeling meaning? Meaning, I believe, is tied to social reality because meaning is created socially. Meaningful is how we describe the links we have to other people, the elemental emotional bonds that keep us in community. Even a child raised by wild animals would navigate the world in terms of the relationships s/he had within that community of animals. What about "The Man Who Planted Trees"? He lived alone and created profound meaning. But not without caring about other people, and not without connecting. What about someone who is completely narcissistic? I ask you, what are the meanings of that life? If the tree falls in the forest, and there is no one there to hear it fall, does it make any noise?
___I may be challenged on this point, as others will seek exceptions to the rule just because, by generalizing, I have included them in the rule. But for me it is true that relationships provide the substrate and medium of meaning, the reasons and motivations that drive me through life. I have many meanings, and they accumulate, as I build my relationships, as I multiply them and improve their quality. My life did not start to make sense, I did not have any sense of direction, until I decided I would abandon any project that did not bring me closer ot other people. By declaring that my activity has as its first purpose to connect me with others, that the productivity I seek must somehow enhance my relationships, I have eliminated the noise of my life. Now there is mostly music. Sense. A way to judge the value of any proposed activity, project or plan. The point of any thing I do is not the thing, but its impact on my relationships, taken at every level of detail, from the immediate and personal to the grandly attentuated, to the impact that my life has on LIFE, on the Earth, on the ability of Earth to support life. Hence my interest in Sustainable Culture.
___From the beginning, in a family system riven by cruelty, I wanted to have a different relationship with my children (I have only one son, he does not live with me). I wanted to have a relationship that would be sustainable over generations. I wanted to have a relationship formula in which rebellion was not necessary. My belief was that, if I could communicate love and support, if my children did not need to fight with me to feel secure and prepared for the life ahead of them, if they could self define without alienating me, I could have them in a sustainable family system, a system that would promote well-being. I was naive, of course, the reality is not so simple, but at an early age I was already wishing for something "sustainable". The desire has not evaporated. My "family" is still quite cruel, although I experience little of that cruelty myself, and still very narrow minded and shortsighted. Much of my family lives in abject poverty, in the ruins of war, lawlessness, depravity, ignorance, and corruption. And what I worry about most is that my family looks set to burn down its house. Global climate chaos multiplied by a human population in excess of Earth's carrying capacity multiplied by human evolution (necessarily) lagging behind the needs for positive, creative, caring adaptation, equals a profound disaster in the making. At the extreme, Possibly the end of all life above the level of paramecium.
___The next posting was written yesterday, before I opened this blog. Writing it for a different blog, where it is not germaine, motivated me to open this blog.