Your squirrels' tree is appropriately phallic for a Freudian response. Is it your love-worthiness or your sexual desires and/or frustrations that are in question?
Asking the right question DOES matter.
The tree analogy actually predates this question. I first used it in this post last month.
So it's more accidental than Freudian.
Lark, Sweeney and Patrizia will remember the long, long posts I put on the Well about this subject –– loveworthiness, that is. I went on and on and on. I remember saying something at the time about always playing the 'affable but oddball next door neighbor' role in people's lives... like Bill Daly or Sid Melton in old TV sitcoms... and ranting about how tired I was of being pigeonholed that way.
Well, that was then –– about ten years ago –– and this is now. The comparison still seems a little apt, but so what? What's the significance? What's the point? There isn't any.
Sometimes, when I'm in a ranting mood, or if I see someone else in a ranting mood, I think about that picture from the Hubble telescope I posted here - the one with the gas cloud and the galaxies glowing in the background. And whatever the rant is that's occupying my thought, I imagine it as a comic-strip type word balloon pointing to one of those stars.
Helps me put the matter in perspective.
But I meant to use the 'love-worthiness' issue as an example, not as the focus of the post. Here's another example: I found myself thinking about something at work this morning –– I don't remember what, now –– but something that first of all, had no bearing on my life one way or the other, and secondly, didn't actually need to be mulled over from the angle from which I was approaching it. So why was I wasting my own internal CPU cycles on it? I actually got myself a little stressed out with this before I realized I didn't need to be thinking about it at all.
The bigger picture is that human beings spend a lot of time thinking about things that just don't need to be thought about. We often approach these things from the wrong perspective, but more importantly, we would often do better to not approach them at all.
Almost any kind of gossip you hear falls into this category. What scandalous rumor have I heard lately that actually required me, for the preservation of the order of the cosmos, to think about it? And as I've gotten older, I've gotten a lot better at tuning that stuff out. Obviously, when I was a reporter, I loved gossip and rumor. But now? Not so much.
Back to my ruminations about 'loveworthiness' –– which isn't exactly a non sequitir, but something close to it. It's like thinking about 'baseball fluid' or 'brick grease'... if you'd written page after page of ramblings about either of those subjects, would you look back on it and think you'd done something profound and productive?
The good news is that it is just perfectly okay to not think at all about two-thirds of the stuff we think about, and maybe more than that. Just give our brains a rest, for god's sake. The stuff doesn't require our attention.
Sexual desires? Frustrations? Those at least have some relevance to my life, but I have found that they're not as important as they used to be.
One of the cool things about detachment is that you can do it on a trial basis. Detach, to use the immediate example, from obsessing about sexual desires and frustrations. If it scares you to be without the angst, as it did me at one time, you can always go back to them. They'll still be around.
(What happened to me, although I didn't realize it at the time, was that the obsessing became an emotional substitute for what I didn't have in my life. 'Hmmm. I seem to be out of Tylenol. I'll just take this Liquid Drano instead to tide me over.')
But if you detach from your obsessions ('Just put it down' as Seung Sahn might say) for a day or two –– and once you get past that initial fear that you're going to disappear from the face of the earth because you're not obsessing –– once you get past that point, it feels kind of refreshing. And you discover that you can choose to obsess or not obsess. And it becomes easier and easier to not obsess.
So I don't obsess as much as I did. I still do it sometimes. Habitual behavior, I guess.
Obviously I can still write mind-numbingly long posts.
3 comments:
Of course I caught the reference to the previous post about squirrels and trees, but it doesn't negate my point to say your reference was accidental.
Here's the dealio from my perspective.
You can say all you want about life being struggle and "just put it down", but no matter what intellectual hoops you may wish to jump through, it doesn't stop the fact that we are homosapiens. Our mammalian nature has certain natural consequences, not the least of which is the desire consistent with survival of the species to have sex. Yes. It's perfectly natural and no messed up Christianist/Islamist or any other kind of religious objections will change that fact.
Part of Freud's genius, followed even today by Adlerians and Jungians and even the good old behavioralists, is his recognition that if we repress our sexual urges, they will simply find another way to come out of hiding.
Obsess about sex or don't. It is an artifact of our humanity that demands attention and will get attention, for good or ill and one way or another.
Heaven preserve me from being so spiritual that I can't enjoy just one more thrust in that direction. If you catch my drift...
Seems some of your readers really need to masterbate, go to a sex anonymous meeting or get a hobby.
All I can add is that it's a damn good thing the survival of the species doesn't rest on my shoulders –– or any other body part.
The idea of going back into the drama and angst of what we sometimes hilariously call 'relationships' literally makes me queasy.
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