JANUARY 11, TUESDAY

DISSATISFACTION

I’ve been thinking about the tensions in married life between nurturing children and being independent and doing a job well and having time to sit and wonder. Women have to make all these choices.

But in thinking about their choices I am really wondering about myself. Why did I for so long feel constrained by an academic institution and and the institutional mindset while at the same time judging what I read by others by how well researched and how well founded on facts it is? Why did I like being embedded, even entwined in, family and domestic life and at the same time needed every second year to escape through travel from both the academic institutional and domestic life? Why is it that now that I am free to travel and free to do what I want, that I so much miss the woman that I was entwined with and often find freedom to be empty and lonely? Why am I always dissatisfied?

Am I dissatisfied because being dissatisfied is built into the human condition. Is being dissatisfied one of the things that makes us human, always restless, never satisfied, always reaching out for more.

When I get what I want I want something else. When I get what I want I want more and more of it until it begins to suffocate or drown or immobize or bore me and I want something else and therefore move restlessly from one thing to another.

It seems to me that I am driven by emotional drives, each of which can make me feel very alive but at the same time they are in tension with each other so that each of them at times blocks out the others.

I really like figuring things out. I like the process of figuring things out, of becoming aware of the world from my own perspective. It doesn’t matter that what I come up with doesn’t suit other people. It is the process of coming up with it that I like. My daily posts are this process.

I really like being touched by people or objects in a way that I think of as being the feminine and erotic. I am touched through music and art and visiting new places and the presence of all sorts of people, young and old, male and female. My response to all of these things makes me feel very alive. Photography is the form that lets me be touched by and respond in all these ways.

At times in my life I have like dreaming up activities that break out of the traditional way of doing things including all kinds of international activities at Warren Wilson. Breaking out of the conventional feels good even when it puzzles other people and even upsets them. Here too it’d is the process that feels good. It is a kind of selfish pleasure.

And I have felt very alive when I really care about other people in my own family or beyond my family. Listening to people and responding to them makes me feel good. But being committed to others and constrained by their desires can also seem suffocating.

It would be nice if I could balance all these ways of responding to the world and do them all at the same time.

But feeling to awareness can become abstract and boring. It can also stifle the erotic, make action seem pointless, and shut me off from accepting other people.

Caring for other people and domestic life can become suffocating and stifling. It prevents honesty in relationships, is threatened by the erotic, and makes work seem a dull obsession.

The erotic, romance, in which people and objects become radiant, can become cloying, it is fickle, it can cause pain both to you and to others. It rejects objective awareness, threatens love and can be destructive of working relationships.

And breaking out of conventions can threaten loving relationships, mock romance and reject common sense and awareness .

I haven’t said this very clearly, but maybe my dissatisfaction comes because all of the things that do satisfy me undercut the other things that satisfy me. I can’t balance them because there is tension built in.

Every way of being fully alive leads to dissatisfaction.

Maybe the human way to deal with this is by stages. As a child we open up and explore as we grow more and more aware, then in our adolescence we rebel and break out and experiment. In our middle age we nurture children and family and then in old age we leave all of these behind and concentrate on awareness, wondering what it was all about. Indians celebrate the four (male) stages of life: childhood, householder, letting go and finally leaving home completely and dedicating yourself to understanding.

Or maybe the way we best balance these is by alternating between them each day with family time, solitary time, dream time, creative time.

But whatever the way we balance these, the tension between them remains and we are, or rather, I am, dissatisfied. Maybe it is because of dissatisfaction and the in ability to settle on anything that has pushed humans to be the dominant species, always innovating, always changing, always experimenting, always wanting more than you have, never satisfied. Maybe this leads to so many languages, so many mythologies, so many forms of clothing, so many types of food. We are never satisfied and always trying something new. I don’t know.