The Single-arity

It has been about 10 months now since I began living on my own, my former wife and I having made the decision to go our separate ways after 34 years of marriage. It was such a strange decision that landed in our midst seemingly out of the blue on what by any account was an ordinary Sunday afternoon. Such decisions and the endings that follow them are never easy and always complicated. My poem, Intention, is my attempt to capture something of my feelings about that day (never an easy thing for me to know or express). The crisis which I precipitated 4 years ago ultimately led to this breaking apart. Yet, in hindsight, things had been breaking for a while. We humans are very good at not seeing what we are not willing to see.

Significant relationships, particularly of long-standing, always change us, and make us something of who we are. People who we let into our lives in profound ways always leave their fingerprints on us. When such relationships dissolve the connection is never entirely broken, for we are part of each other's narratives. The story of each life is always and forever partially a shared story. And while there is pain in that, there is also gratitude.

Navigating the last few years has required me to dive more deeply into my story. It was a story that I thought I knew and understood. Yet I discovered that there were parts of my story that had been stuffed into the writer's drawer -- unrefined, unedited, scrawled in urgency and then stuffed away, not meant to become part of the book. And yet they were always part of the book. In some ways, they were the key to understanding it.

In opening that drawer and looking at those unpublished fragments of my story, I began to realize how much anxiety and terror had been at the heart of my life. Anxiety about being the kind of person I felt I was expected to be, terror at being found lacking or earning the disapproval of others. It led to a need to always be reading other people's emotional states, anticipating others' reactions, and trying to manage those things in others in order to avoid conflict or disapproval or judgment -- because those things felt annihilating, as if the end of the world -- the end of me -- would be the result.

When one lives this way for a long time -- in my case over 50 years -- one ends up losing one's self. You wind up not really knowing who you are because you are always trying to be the person you think other people expect you to be. It feels safer. But the cost is enormous.

I have come to the conclusion that within each of us is what I am currently choosing to call the Engineered Self and the Authentic Self. The Engineered Self is the self that is constructed as we move through childhood into adulthood, assembled and put together with contributions from family and culture. It is the self that we build, almost without consciously realizing it, in order to get along (whatever that may mean to each of us). Beneath the Engineered Self is the Authentic Self -- the one who witnesses the thoughts and emotions of the Engineered Self. It is the self in which our consciousness resides, the place of connection with the divine.

In many ways the task of our life -- the essence of the spiritual journey -- is to deconstruct the Engineered Self, to see it for what it is, and allow the Authentic Self to be fully expressed. We know that we are acting out of our Authentic Self when we are able to be present to our lives in what might be called perfect freedom, the experience of the peace which passes all understanding. We know that we are rooted in our Authentic Self when we are able to move past the limiting narratives and thought patterns of the Engineered Self, when we are able to let go of the notion that our worth comes from what we do, what we possess, or what other people think of us.

Ideally, the Authentic Self can find its voice and flourish in relationship. For me, however, it seems that this was not possible. Sometimes -- and for me, this seems to be true -- one must venture into single-arity in order to begin to find the Authentic Self.

The irony of the last few years is that everything I did to avoid that which I most feared led to the manifestation of what I most feared. And the pain of that was seering. Yet, that seering pain also burned away, in the end, the anxiety and terror that had governed my life. That which had been whispered in the dark recesses of my soul had been brought into the light and splashed upon the world. The Engineered Self almost entirely collapsed -- there was nothing left but smoldering wreckage.

I cannot say this has left me rooted only and completely in my Authentic Self. The Engineered Self usually finds a way. Perhaps we really cannot live entirely without it. But it seems that, in this new single-arity, after nearly everything had been burned away, I am nearer to my Authentic Self than I once was. For where once there was anxiety and terror ther is now, increasingly, freedom and peace.