I am a bit tired today – a mistake in minor medications, a mildly bad night... and, as so often, I only realized at about five or six a.m. what the obvious mistake must have been, and why my guts were churning as a result.
Not terrible. A bit exasperating.
And two different friends, eager to connect – one saying, can we Skype now (no, how about tomorrow night instead), the other calling twice... some people who don't take no for an answer, not easily. But I can easily ignore them, then later innocently saying, oh, did you call?
Because the era of needing to answer the phone immediately was over decades ago, with the advent of answering machines. We are far past that now.
It used to be such a useful dramatic device, in plays and movies: the phone rings, you have to answer it – it is a harbinger, or an eerie warning, or bad news. Not often good news, that wouldn't have been useful in getting the plots moving. I do think of those eras when interrupting time was a normal experience – those decades when people had gotten accustomed to the shrill ring...
It's far better that that is over. Phones may create their own problems these days, but at least they are not such disruptive, unlabeled incursions.
I suppose you can even tell, from some spatial apps, if the call is coming from inside the house....
•••
Coasting through summer, the day after the solstice.
It is still the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic; I am still in quasi-lockdown, as are many here in the north of England.
And still not anxious, or particularly distracted about it all. Which at times leads to me being, perhaps, a little bit inappropriate – I've been visibly impatient and amused in several meetings including, probably most annoyingly, one with the Jung-Institut alumni.
I do, still, get bored and irritated by people who generate tragic anxiety while sitting in their comfortable homes... yes, I know, it's rather unsympathetic of me. But some Jungians do seem impelled to have Feeellliiings, perhaps in order to prove something about themselves (their kindness, their sensitivity? their professional abilities? their fragile Récamier-sofa delicacy?) by getting weepy about anything they can find...
Just as an opposing bunch of Jungians do the narcissistic-guy-who-needs-everyone-to-praise-his-newest-project thing (I've had at least three dramatic versions of that in the past few weeks).
Both patterns are also visible among the academics that make up another chunk of my professional world, but at least among the analysts one more easily sees the pattern – usually with a sense that the person dramatizing the pattern half-knows that they're doing it, and so there is at least some space to step past the heaviness, the messiness of the pattern.
Of course being rather bitchy about it, as I often am, is not quite so welcome. Ah well, this is in some ways a more developed version of me at 40 (and me at 27 and me at 18 and me at 13 and me at...).
Hey, I'm judgmental, it's what I do.
•••
But it is a pleasant day, and I am in a pleasant mood, generally. The two minor shadows above – they're trivia, things that pass frequently but unimportantly.
In fact, as so often in the past five or six years, I have a large-scale sense, like a kind of intuitive gestalt, of veils dissolving... of bonds falling away.
Which is, I suppose, individuation. Good thing, too.
I suppose I hadn't known that my life after my second analysis (and, perhaps, after my first one in 1987-92) would be so much about yet-another-veil-fading... that I would not leap into a new way of being, that I would instead fall, almost without noticing, every few months, a few millimeters – these days, perhaps, something more like a few feet – and realize that there is more space around me, more room to move. Without much concern or worry.
Life bigger, more fluid. And a sense that some people already live like this, and look at the rest of us and think: why do you cripple yourselves in that peculiar manner?....
I do wish I'd been this, known this, earlier... but then I would be a different person entirely, of course.
•••
If I reverse the point of view on these changes, they can move back into all those science-fictional visions of if-I-had-lived-otherwise... which, because, why the hell not, can be meshed with if-the-world-had-been-otherwise.
A common version of this for me is the one I've outlined before: a less damaged San Francisco in a less fragmented world, a less disoriented me who has found a way to be creative and happy, and with love and friends of course. No AIDS in this universe.
But today as I walk past that familiar vision, I think – if it had gone that way, if I were in a comfortable but not ostentatious house in Marin, someone I love and a pet or two in another part of the house; making breakfast as I am now making breakfast – perhaps even not such a different breakfast, granola, yogurt, some raspberries – would that other me look out the window and down the hill into the dazzling view, and think: I wonder if I've missed a lot, being happy and busy here, not having lived other lives, not going through different, darker experiences, in different countries? Has it all been too simple, too easy?....
•••
But I suppose discontent is always available, from one angle or another.
•••
I wash the dishes and fold the laundry; the windows are open because it is not too chilly, there is a gust of fresh rain... it is this kind of summer day....