Okay, now what?

Man, this connection-with-self exercise is really hard. I know I keep going on and on about it, but it does seem to be true what I've heard: all effective and satisfying relationships begin with it, and without it all we are is lost and alone.

I know of only one shortcut to connection with oneself (unless you're the Dalai Lama), and it's definitely the hard way: that is to get physically injured or really sick. Winning the lottery pales when one has just barked one's shin on the open dishwasher door for the fourth time that day. The most expensive, exotic, fabulous and food-filled ocean cruise is utterly lost on someone who is wretchedly, wrenchingly, and retchingly seasick. It is easy to get one's own attention if the body is in distress -- ask any cutter. And that is really sad, isn't it?

So, masochism aside, how in the world do we find ourselves, secure the connection, fit back into our own skins? I happen to have the luxury of examining this today, because my stomach is upset. Maybe it's the heat, which has been brutal for a week and will be for another 5 days at least. Maybe it's some kind of food allergy. Could be sympathy for the dogs (who entertained themselves and us all day yesterday with a festival of diarrhea). Whatever it is I have no desire to accomplish anything today, but am feeling too lousy to sleep. That leaves me trudging back to my lesson plan.

In review, then, boys and girls, here's the process of connection (which, you'll recall, is what we get when we love):

1. Love beyond recollection (that must be the forgiveness thing);
2. Love beyond vision;
3. Love beyond judgment;
4. Love beyond quality;
5. Love beyond condition;
6. Love beyond expectation; and
7. Love beyond reciprocation.

I've been thrashing around with (1) for weeks now -- and been pretty noisy about it, I know -- but I think I get it. It is indeed the forgiveness thing, and if we are to forgive completely we have to unbuckle our own guilt-embossed straitjackets, right? Of course right. I've known all along, and dreaded it, that sooner or later I was going to have to deal with guilt, and so I'm on it. In the end, there's really no recourse for decades-old missteps but to forgive them and let them go. Oprah's right when she says that we do what we know, and sometimes I feel that I have been 13 years old all the way up to yesterday, with occasional flashes of precocity, making a lot of really dumb decisions, but they were the best I could do at the time. And that's really the point: I always did the best I could do, and to ask any more of anyone, especially of oneself, is to ask the impossible.

[Note: Art Buchwald (I think) on a day of pleasant ball-tossing and other familial bonhomie, ordered his eight-year-old son to sign an affidavit to the effect that he was having a happy childhood. If only I had thought of that, my children and I wouldn't now be saddled with only the memories of sad and painful times of their (and my!) youth. We're running out of witnesses to the happy, funny, loving occasions, and are being held hostage to the miserable ones.]

Therefore, all that being so, we tiptoe out of the amphitheater of guilt, leaving the Greeks to do their garment-rending in peace.

We progress onto (2): Love beyond vision. I am still not sure what that might be, but a friend suggests that it is faith. In the darkest possible part of the forest, it's all we can do to see the next safe place to step. We guess that it's in the general direction of home, we hope that there's not a snake hidden under the leaves, we pray that if there ARE any guardian angels they're still awake at the switch. We proceed anyway.

Must be a control problem. Is there ANYONE of my acquaintance here that has the tiniest issue with control? If so, please speak up. It is not a subject with which I have any familiarity. (Right, Juls.)

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