Fear

Yesterday morning in the car, I was listening to an audio book by one of my favorite teachers, Eckhardt Tolle. The book is called The Art of Presence, and he made a statement that really struck me: "all aggression is linked to fear."

When I feel angry or aggressive as I have over the last few days, it's really uncomfortable. I don't like it at all. As I wrote about earlier this week, I feel much more comfortable with the pure expression of grief.

At the same time, I know that the anger is there for a reason, it just takes me a couple of days (or sometimes weeks, years or decades, depending on the anger we're talking about) to recognize it and let it speak what it is trying to say rather than taking it out on everyone and everything around me. As another of my favorite spiritual teachers, much less famous but no less wise, reminds me: "I let my anger teach me." Yeah, grudgingly, reluctantly, I do.

And when I heard Eckhardt tying it to fear, I began to ask myself what, exactly, I'm afraid of, and through this process I realized a couple of important things.

But first, the fears that I identified:

1) I'm afraid that my love will not be okay without me
2) I'm afraid that my love will be okay without me
3) I'm afraid that I will never stop wanting to be with him, but won't be able to be, at least for a while and maybe never again, leaving me with this horrible feeling of wanting for as long as I live.

That might sound a little dramatic -- especially that last one -- and it looks dramatic to me, seeing it in black and white, but those were the fears I identified.

Now for the realizations:

1) None of these are actually problems in this moment, and that's all I really need to worry about. Granted, that leaves me with what I am feeling in this moment, which is this crushing loss, this undoing of the rhythm of my daily life, and of my kids' daily life.

2) All three of those fears can't possibly come true, and there really isn't one that I couldn't live with, especially since I know the horribleness of this feeling is temporal; it will fade in time.

As I was working on this post earlier today, I searched my blog to be sure I hadn't already used this song, and I stumbled on this post, which contains a really hot picture of my love and me, setting off a crying jag for yours truly. But like the third time I was awoken in the night this week, I decided to do something different than I have been doing with these feelings.

I decided to call a friend in the midst of it, to tell her I didn't want to be alone with this grief anymore, that it was too big for me to face by myself, and I knew she could understand it. She didn't pick up, so I left a tearful message, and amazingly, I felt better just having left the message!

When I talked to her later, she said she was so glad I called, and that she could hear a shift in my voice as I shared the depth of my pain in my message. And I felt even better after we talked. Pretty cool, and I feel pretty lucky to have friends with whom I can share my pain. It doesn't really lessen it, but it sure makes it easier to bear.

As does staying in the now, and trying to feel things when they come up without attaching any story to them. That's hard to do, especially, I think, with fear:

But I fear
I have nothing to give
I have so much to lose
here in this lonely place
tangled up in our embrace
there's nothing I'd like
better than to fall
but I fear I have nothing to give

I love Sarah McLachlan, and this song is so beautiful. But it's interesting that it's the one that came up for me today, because I honestly think it expresses the fears of my love a lot better than it expresses my own.

I wish Wisconsin wasn't such a lonely place for him, a place where he felt he had so much to lose. I wish he felt able to give more of himself, to let me in more, to decide, once and for all, not to do it alone. To trust love. But once again, I can't control these things. And probably the harder I tried, the less likely it was that we would ever find our way to a mutual, totally psyched to be spending our lives together, yes, even in Wisconsin (for a few more years), place.

Which is why I understood he needed to go, and why I have to keep working at letting him go, with as much grace as I can muster, trying not to let fear overwhelm me.

But god, f%#*ing damn it, I miss being tangled up in our embrace...