Saturday, April 11, 2009

Wishing vs Fate

So it has been awhile since the last writing but man have things been crazy. So I am back in economic times where jobs are threatened left and right. People are talking when they will be laid off. There is discussion that this time is slower than the last crazy time or times as it were. I guess now it is death by a 1000 paper cuts and the dying are doing it slowly. We are working so much harder and instead of brooding on when we will get home to the kids or dog or life we are just happy that we are working.

So here I sit, 11 pm at night on the balcony of the new digs which sits on the beach. I am loving the view, the sound of the waves and the feel of the ever present breeze. It reminds of my childhood since we were always at the Jersey Shore growing up. Whether we went on weekends, on nights to the boardwalk - Wildwood, Atlantic City, Ocean City, Stone Harbor, Cape May... it was always a part of growing up. When we vacationed in FL it was Orlando. The palm trees, the crazy large hotels with lights shining at night. The odd surrealness of it it. Well I am back there now in condo land. I have a 12th floor place and though I am renting, it is quite an interesting culture. I am not really around during the days to get to know the people that live here full time but I can say it is a priveledged if a slightly twisted lifestyle.

I wonder if I deseve it. Not in a meloncholoy whiney way but in the old ancient tradition of sacrafice and universal balance. I am reading an interesting book called "The Wishing Year" and it is written by a practicing Zen Buddhist who dares to wish for a house, a man and peace in her soul. She gets caught up with an internal paradox by mixing the wish for material and selfish items with wishing for something spiritual. Is it bad to wish for more money? Is it bad to belive in fate? Can we make our fate by "putting it out there"? We all have met people who unabashidly believe that it is their right to wish for more money or a new man or something material.... how is it that some of us feel the need to balance, sacrafice and cringe at the thought while others believe they somehow deserve peace and happiness without sacrafice? I have always mixed asking for things with the list of the sacrafices I would make. As a little girl I would sit in bed at night and wish for things to be better at home and have a full on list of things that I held dear to myself as things for sacrafice.

Ancient cultures sacraficed animals and humans for a good crop, a good hunt. They wished for fertility of their selves, their animals, their crops. It was all done for the balance. There is the concept that there would be rain dances before the rainy season - not during the drought times - but when they expected rains. The thought would be that they would do what they could as humans to make it happen. Give it the edge. But never without sacrafice. Is this an evolutionary pull? Something that we all hold deep in ourselves? Is it innate? Religious? Why some and not others? I don't know but I feel that when I am happy I wait for the shoe to drop. And if I thought about this in a new age kind of way, it would mean that I am inviting disaster to come forward. If maybe in a Jungian way it would be that I don't deserve success or happiness - and if you sprinkle Freud it would have something to do with parents and the ultimate rejection of the father. And though he did reject his children, I cannot logically blame him. But there is something that is not written but is felt that there has to be some balance. I know when I blurt out loud that I love a man, I inevitably lose him. Do I destroy it? Fear of success? Of course that is another blog - what is success.... and I have to say typing outside in the dark with this intense screen light is allowable for one blog only.

I have no logical answer and I am trying very hard to beat the need to question whether I deserve this. I go back to the working my ass off to make millions for others... I go back to losing my time for my exercise, eating health and doing my art. Those things are precious to me. If I regain them, do I lose the ocean view? Or will things balance out. Maybe this is all about control and we all
know that is not a good way to live.

So for now, I send my quiet thanks to the {fill in the blank here} and hope on some weird level that this is mine for now because I deserve it, I have paid the dues for it and I will experience the joy of it without the fear of the other shoe dropping. If that shoe does d
rop, at least I hope it is in the form of the lateste YSL platform architectural variety because I have to say, they fucking rock. And it my world has to be torn down (again, and again) then it better fucking be a damn good design.