the littlest buddhist says: *grrrraaahhhhggggle*
something in ani_moore's daily Karmic Kisses is kicking my kushy tushy, and i'm not happy. i also slept badly last night and had an absolutely horrid workout this morning, so there's a good chance i'm just warming up to having a bad day.
the karmic koan in particular is, "Strive for progress, not perfection".
the biggest part of my internal stress on the relationship front to date, is the lack of clear goals: explicit end dates, explicit targets for data amounts or types. we're striving to hit a nebulous, ambiguously-defined "comfort level", and because that's being determined, to a large degree, by a head other than mine own, i have no idea what that comfort level looks like.
in the past month or so, i've become very aware of how i strive to meet solid, tangible milestones; i want palpable successes i can see, touch, comprehend. i depend on the immediate kind of success/failure feedback that comes of seeing a goal accomplished, or a project finished - it's why when i get completely stressed out, i either go make simple things like beaded necklaces (which have a very obvious start and end point), or i seek emotional and physical catharsis (which also has a very obvious end pont that i can detail quite explicitly, but most of you either already understand, or don't need to know).
i'm *trying* to wrap my head around the idea that the end goal isn't the point of the process, but rather, the *process* is the point of the process, and i'm suffering a severe cramp in my ability to deal with this bigger-and-harder-than-it-looks shift in paradigm. it's a difficult thing to set one's sights on a particular form of goal, an obvious acknowledgement that things have worked, or things are better, or the integration of changes has been successful, only to learn that you're not getting there as fast as you want to, as fast as you thought you were.
matthew raised a significant point to me last night while we were engaged in a non-argument about stress and emotional exhaustion; i was feeling my inner child kick at the idea that it was apparently OK, if not a requirement, that we move at matthew's speed of comfort, but definitely NOT OK to move at the speed of my comfort. we had already ascertained that in this relationship, matthew is the cautious one and i am the risk-taker, that i will be ready to act in a situation with far less explicit data than matthew requires to act in similar situations. the point he reminded me of last night is that i voluntarily defered to his comfort levels, and agreed to engage and remain present in the process of examining and refining our relationship structure and Standard Operating Procedures.
i hate it when i'm smart. apparently i hate it more when i discover i was smart previously, and lost the focus somewhere along the way.
yes, i agreed to all of this; i made a mostly-informed choice, and by "mostly-informed", i mean i agreed to engage and stay present in a process that was, at the outset, ill-defined. we knew something had to change, but we didn't start out with a clear idea of what the scope of those changes would be, nor what the target end goals looked like for both of us (i knew what i *wanted*, i presumed matthew wanted the same things, but in asking the questions, "SO... what does that end goal actually look like to you?", we found there were a lot of things we didn't know about each other). we didn't have a clearly-defined exit strategy, and when we *did* finally put something together, it still doesn't work like *i* expected (there's the demon word, right there) it to. we weren't finished. i still feeling like i'm trying to shoot at targets in the dark, because when matthew says, "I need to be comfortable", i don't know what that means, in spite of repeatedly asking him. he gets as far as telling me he needs information, but he can't tell me what kind of information, or how much. there's no formula here, so i don't know if i'm providing too much, or too little, or the kinds of stuff he wants and needs to hear, or...
yesterday was one of those horrendously difficult and vulnerable days where i had heaped a tremendous amount of information on him - information i *worked* for, not stuff i could just make up myself, information that took effort and energy to deal with (see previous notes about how relationship stuff is one of the necessary energy drains i'm juggling lately) - and he was "too tired" to deal with it. and i got mad. i got mad because i'm working through my tiredness to meet needs i don't feel he has adequately defined for *my* liking, and i didn't get the feeling he was putting in an equal effort. i didn't feel like he willing to work with me to see if what i was providing did/does, in fact, meet what little we know about his needs.
in short, i felt like i was working towards a specific goal by engaging in the process, and he wasn't; that i was being expected to provide information to sift through at his leisure, to judge at his leisure (with no regard to my need for concrete progess towards specific end goals on *my* agenda... yeah, i'm sure everyone sees how that looks, huh?). feelings are feelings; that one was all mine. and it brought a lot of my recent frustrations and all my recent anger to a head. the good news is, i looked at that surge in my head, knew it for what it was, and did not act on it - as Pema Chodron writes, i "touched it, and let it go". it's there, i'm still aware of the anger and frustration moving under the surface. i've even communicated (am communicating) it to matthew.
matthew and i agreed to engage in this examination and repair process, but we never agreed to, nor even discussed, how each of us engaged that process on a personal level. me, i like finite end points: i work best when i have clarity of purpose, which in my mind means knowing what specific target i'm aiming at, and why. for me, it's the easiest way (typically) to gauge my success rate - did i hit the target or not? i don't know - because i have not asked explicitly - whether matthew had something more specific in mind as an end goal than "being good with it", or being comfortable with our decisions and the increased understanding of our actions. in the past two months especially, as we started to get closer to what looked like an exit strategy, if not the actual exit point, i started to push for what felt like checklist items: what do i/we have to do to reach my/our goals? what have we done? when are we going to get to the remaining items? how long do we think it's going to take to complete these tasks?
fixating on achieving the perfection... that's me.
surprise to no-one: matthew has been unable to provide answers to these questions. it's hard to gauge comfort in a situation of shifting definitions and emotions and expectations, harder still when someone's breathing down your neck to get with the program because you're holding up her own agenda.
so in some ways, i feel like i'm still angaging the process for the process' sake - i'm aware of, and moving through my frustrations with disparate comfort zones and relative speeds of progress; i'm still actively engaging the discussions, still providing data, still trying to understand matthew's needs better so i can determine how best i can meet them. and yes, i'm definitely pushing him - who has the need, drives the solution. and i admit my need is to have those concrete goals that i can see, touch, achieve.
i'm struggling to find the balance between the process, and the goal. this week - these past couple of weeks - really haven't been good for that balance. i don't know how to let go of that goal-oriented "need to complete" and simply absorb the process as it unfolds. i'm trying... i really am. but i want what i want, and in the end, i can't yet find in myself the willingness to let go of the wants completely (not to say i can't still have what i want or work towards it, but having what i want need not be the be-all-and-end-all of the process.... *any* process).
it's days like today - and yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that - that show me what it means to be human and fallible; to strive for something and not attain it, or to be so close while struggling to balance the process and the desire. getting the reminder in the Karmic Kisses this morning drives home the fact that sometimes, the goal isn't the point. i don't think i'm completely ready to derail that lifelong pattern yet, but i become increasingly aware of it as i become increasingly aware that there are alternatives to that approach to self-awareness and self-improvement. like matthew himself is pondering these days, i find myself wondering whether i *have to* know everything in advance and have every detail mapped out within this process, or if i can just accept a looser framework and expect that things will change? do i have to strive single-mindedly for a fixed goal, or can i accept the fact that things are changing, can change, will change, and that the focus should be on the process, not the end point?
maybe. not today, i think, but just... maybe...
the karmic koan in particular is, "Strive for progress, not perfection".
the biggest part of my internal stress on the relationship front to date, is the lack of clear goals: explicit end dates, explicit targets for data amounts or types. we're striving to hit a nebulous, ambiguously-defined "comfort level", and because that's being determined, to a large degree, by a head other than mine own, i have no idea what that comfort level looks like.
in the past month or so, i've become very aware of how i strive to meet solid, tangible milestones; i want palpable successes i can see, touch, comprehend. i depend on the immediate kind of success/failure feedback that comes of seeing a goal accomplished, or a project finished - it's why when i get completely stressed out, i either go make simple things like beaded necklaces (which have a very obvious start and end point), or i seek emotional and physical catharsis (which also has a very obvious end pont that i can detail quite explicitly, but most of you either already understand, or don't need to know).
i'm *trying* to wrap my head around the idea that the end goal isn't the point of the process, but rather, the *process* is the point of the process, and i'm suffering a severe cramp in my ability to deal with this bigger-and-harder-than-it-looks shift in paradigm. it's a difficult thing to set one's sights on a particular form of goal, an obvious acknowledgement that things have worked, or things are better, or the integration of changes has been successful, only to learn that you're not getting there as fast as you want to, as fast as you thought you were.
matthew raised a significant point to me last night while we were engaged in a non-argument about stress and emotional exhaustion; i was feeling my inner child kick at the idea that it was apparently OK, if not a requirement, that we move at matthew's speed of comfort, but definitely NOT OK to move at the speed of my comfort. we had already ascertained that in this relationship, matthew is the cautious one and i am the risk-taker, that i will be ready to act in a situation with far less explicit data than matthew requires to act in similar situations. the point he reminded me of last night is that i voluntarily defered to his comfort levels, and agreed to engage and remain present in the process of examining and refining our relationship structure and Standard Operating Procedures.
i hate it when i'm smart. apparently i hate it more when i discover i was smart previously, and lost the focus somewhere along the way.
yes, i agreed to all of this; i made a mostly-informed choice, and by "mostly-informed", i mean i agreed to engage and stay present in a process that was, at the outset, ill-defined. we knew something had to change, but we didn't start out with a clear idea of what the scope of those changes would be, nor what the target end goals looked like for both of us (i knew what i *wanted*, i presumed matthew wanted the same things, but in asking the questions, "SO... what does that end goal actually look like to you?", we found there were a lot of things we didn't know about each other). we didn't have a clearly-defined exit strategy, and when we *did* finally put something together, it still doesn't work like *i* expected (there's the demon word, right there) it to. we weren't finished. i still feeling like i'm trying to shoot at targets in the dark, because when matthew says, "I need to be comfortable", i don't know what that means, in spite of repeatedly asking him. he gets as far as telling me he needs information, but he can't tell me what kind of information, or how much. there's no formula here, so i don't know if i'm providing too much, or too little, or the kinds of stuff he wants and needs to hear, or...
yesterday was one of those horrendously difficult and vulnerable days where i had heaped a tremendous amount of information on him - information i *worked* for, not stuff i could just make up myself, information that took effort and energy to deal with (see previous notes about how relationship stuff is one of the necessary energy drains i'm juggling lately) - and he was "too tired" to deal with it. and i got mad. i got mad because i'm working through my tiredness to meet needs i don't feel he has adequately defined for *my* liking, and i didn't get the feeling he was putting in an equal effort. i didn't feel like he willing to work with me to see if what i was providing did/does, in fact, meet what little we know about his needs.
in short, i felt like i was working towards a specific goal by engaging in the process, and he wasn't; that i was being expected to provide information to sift through at his leisure, to judge at his leisure (with no regard to my need for concrete progess towards specific end goals on *my* agenda... yeah, i'm sure everyone sees how that looks, huh?). feelings are feelings; that one was all mine. and it brought a lot of my recent frustrations and all my recent anger to a head. the good news is, i looked at that surge in my head, knew it for what it was, and did not act on it - as Pema Chodron writes, i "touched it, and let it go". it's there, i'm still aware of the anger and frustration moving under the surface. i've even communicated (am communicating) it to matthew.
matthew and i agreed to engage in this examination and repair process, but we never agreed to, nor even discussed, how each of us engaged that process on a personal level. me, i like finite end points: i work best when i have clarity of purpose, which in my mind means knowing what specific target i'm aiming at, and why. for me, it's the easiest way (typically) to gauge my success rate - did i hit the target or not? i don't know - because i have not asked explicitly - whether matthew had something more specific in mind as an end goal than "being good with it", or being comfortable with our decisions and the increased understanding of our actions. in the past two months especially, as we started to get closer to what looked like an exit strategy, if not the actual exit point, i started to push for what felt like checklist items: what do i/we have to do to reach my/our goals? what have we done? when are we going to get to the remaining items? how long do we think it's going to take to complete these tasks?
fixating on achieving the perfection... that's me.
surprise to no-one: matthew has been unable to provide answers to these questions. it's hard to gauge comfort in a situation of shifting definitions and emotions and expectations, harder still when someone's breathing down your neck to get with the program because you're holding up her own agenda.
so in some ways, i feel like i'm still angaging the process for the process' sake - i'm aware of, and moving through my frustrations with disparate comfort zones and relative speeds of progress; i'm still actively engaging the discussions, still providing data, still trying to understand matthew's needs better so i can determine how best i can meet them. and yes, i'm definitely pushing him - who has the need, drives the solution. and i admit my need is to have those concrete goals that i can see, touch, achieve.
i'm struggling to find the balance between the process, and the goal. this week - these past couple of weeks - really haven't been good for that balance. i don't know how to let go of that goal-oriented "need to complete" and simply absorb the process as it unfolds. i'm trying... i really am. but i want what i want, and in the end, i can't yet find in myself the willingness to let go of the wants completely (not to say i can't still have what i want or work towards it, but having what i want need not be the be-all-and-end-all of the process.... *any* process).
it's days like today - and yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that - that show me what it means to be human and fallible; to strive for something and not attain it, or to be so close while struggling to balance the process and the desire. getting the reminder in the Karmic Kisses this morning drives home the fact that sometimes, the goal isn't the point. i don't think i'm completely ready to derail that lifelong pattern yet, but i become increasingly aware of it as i become increasingly aware that there are alternatives to that approach to self-awareness and self-improvement. like matthew himself is pondering these days, i find myself wondering whether i *have to* know everything in advance and have every detail mapped out within this process, or if i can just accept a looser framework and expect that things will change? do i have to strive single-mindedly for a fixed goal, or can i accept the fact that things are changing, can change, will change, and that the focus should be on the process, not the end point?
maybe. not today, i think, but just... maybe...