Musings

I have not updated this for ages. It was a reasonably stressful summer between one thing and another. I took on extra caring responsibilities, Art had work and family stress, my work was busy and some of my closest friends have been and are going through tough times.

This weekend and last weekend, I have been able to have some much needed alone time with Sausage for company. We have had time and space to rest, do the things we like to do, get some exercise, meet friends for short periods of time, work on writing and on knitting projects. It's all good. :)

I notice that I am and have been for some time, going through a time in my life of appreciating those sorts of things. Time outside in the fresh air, the colours as the season changes, growing things in my garden, the pleasure of moving my body, time spent talking with people I love or making myself available to give them support and help with their projects.

I feel rich and as if I live a life of luxury and decadence to be able to do these things so freely. I know that I am. I live a life rich beyond the wildest dreams of most people on this planet.

I feel too that community is important and do what I can to nurture it. I have strong boundaries about being busy at work. While I don't mind giving my job a few extra hours if we are busy, I don't expect to ever do more than that. If more is required, I expect more people to be involved. I'm good at giving work to others and I'm reasonably good at providing support so that they can do the new work. I have no wish to be the single, important person that everything depends on.

I have been that person in the past and spent several years fighting it, convincing my bosses that they must get more people involved. The need for that was due to the person who did my job previously to me. That person worked and worked and worked - evenings, weekends. They lost two long term relationships to work and eventually had a breakdown, spending months off sick.

This resulted in a strong expectation that whoever does my job, is the single, important person who puts the hours in and who everybody depends on. Not me. I prefer to be part of a crowd. I don't compete with others and prefer to have a supportive group around me. So that is what I pushed for and kept pushing for until it happened.

So now, I am part of a supportive community at work. When my area becomes swamped with work, we seek additional people to work with us and if that is not enough, we let our customers know that they must wait a bit.

I speak to people and sometimes find it hard now to understand some of them. Chat about things bought - choices of cushions and new furniture or talk about all the places they have seen when they were on holiday. These conversations often seem to have a competitive edge to them.

How people I meet talk about their work too seems odd to me. They'll talk about the necessity of working into the evening, of not having lunch, of how stretched, stressed and upset they are. I sometimes ask what would happen if they just left work or switched off their computer in the evening? Would somebody die? Would their actions result in significant suffering? The answer is usually no, not at all, but if I were just to understand how important the work is, I would see why they must work like that.

I don't understand at all. I see that for people in precarious work situations, they must keep going or risk losing their income and for others, if they leave work somebody probably will die. Most of the people I speak to are not in those situations. Many have permanent, well paid jobs and the only impact of them sticking to the hours they are paid for would be some mild irritation on the part of their customers.

It seems odd to me that people in that position would focus so strongly on work and on buying objects rather than on community and love. Stranger still that people living lives of utter and complete luxury seem so stressed out and anxious about everything. My own opinion is that people are like that because they feel isolated, too busy to be with their loved ones and often needing to be competitive with their colleagues. Also because they feel like they need to have lots of stuff and lots of holiday photos of the right places before they are worthwhile as human beings.

IP
 
...I feel rich and as if I live a life of luxury and decadence to be able to do these things so freely. I know that I am. I live a life rich beyond the wildest dreams of most people on this planet.

I feel this way as well. Like I am the "luckiest girl in world" because I can live my live on my own terms.

...I have no wish to be the single, important person that everything depends on.

I have no wish to be that person, unfortunately sometimes I am...

... I prefer to be part of a crowd. I don't compete with others and prefer to have a supportive group around me. So that is what I pushed for and kept pushing for until it happened.

I've been pushing for this for 15 years, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. To be honest, this is the best it has ever been - in terms of support from below, and the worst that it has it has ever been - in terms of support from above.

So now, I am part of a supportive community at work. When my area becomes swamped with work, we seek additional people to work with us and if that is not enough, we let our customers know that they must wait a bit.

.. Would somebody die? Would their actions result in significant suffering? The answer is usually no...

And for some of us the answer is "yes". And that is huge. MrS gets it, Dude doesn't always. For me, the minimum criteria for a "good day" is that nobody died. Doesn't matter if the day sucked for me personally...

It seems odd to me that people in that position would focus so strongly on work and on buying objects rather than on community and love. Stranger still that people living lives of utter and complete luxury seem so stressed out and anxious about everything. My own opinion is that people are like that because they feel isolated, too busy to be with their loved ones and often needing to be competitive with their colleagues. Also because they feel like they need to have lots of stuff and lots of holiday photos of the right places before they are worthwhile as human beings.

That seems odd to me as well, and I see it in my professional colleagues. I don't really understand why they place so much emphasis on random materialistic things - we have fucking READL shit to deal with and they care about what kind of car they drive? where they went on vacation? how much they spent on this/that/the other random life accessory?
 
Poly has been on my mind a bit again. For a couple of reasons. One being that Art and I discussed it again a while ago. We periodically check in with each other to see if we are both still happy with how our relationship is going.

We've had to kind of meet in the middle. Art feels strongly that people should by poly or in open relationships. He sees it as the ethically right thing to do. Thinks that the expectation of monogamy is wrong and that people should be pushing against it and finding new ways.

I agree with him - theoretically. I am totally on board with his reasons. Absolutely and utterly agree with them. For me, the practicalities of having poly or open relationships in the social situation that Art and I live in, means that to do so in practice pushes against some of my own ethics. For me, at the moment, I could consider a solo poly approach only.

In the past I have suggested to Art that we go back to being friends which would allow me to be comfortable ethically and allow Art to pursue the sorts of relationships he wants. For various reasons, that suggestion isn't popular with either of us and so we kind of meet in the middle. I bend on my feeling that romantic relationships are a weird and often ethically tricky way of going about human relating. Art bends on his feelings about poly or open relationships. We keep talking and right now our mono relationships suits both of us very well.

The second reason poly has been on my mind is that I've been writing on other forums about the period in my life when I changed everything about it to enable me to learn what I needed to to support a platonic loved one as we walked together through life. The relationship I had with him (he has passed on now) was one of the most intimate, life changing and affirming ones I've ever had. Nothing about me is the same because of him. What I needed to learn to support him meant giving up much of my life.

I studied, I made a whole group of new friends, I gave myself over to the sort of activities I needed to to do support my loved one.

For about 8 years it took over my life. It was only after that time I found it possible to rekindle the friendships that I hadn't been able to spend much time on and to fall in romantic love. So now I have Art, I have my old friends and social activities and I have a additional group of friends, interests and social stuff.

Supporting my loved one through his troubles wasn't something to be taken lightly. What he and I did together can so easily (and is so often) be done badly, go wrong and cause a pile of emotional damage to all involved. I think that to practise non-monogamy in a society set up to expect monogamy is similar. Easy to do badly and to cause harm.

I feel that to learn how to do non-monogamy (whether it's me who is non-monogamous or my partner) in a way that wasn't ethically problematic to me, I'd need to do a similar thing. Give myself over to it. Find a bunch of new friends to help guide me, learn new skills, find a social group for whom non-monogamy was a desired thing, possibly study too.

The thing is, I don't want to. I have a busy, fulfilled life. I'm still learning and growing in the things I already do and I don't want to stop any of them. There is no time in my life for non-monogamy - so much as I agree with Art about the theoretical good of it, I'm not willing to make the space to do the practise.

It is what it is and I think that so long as we keep talking and are open that things may change between us, we are doing okay. :)

IP
 
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