single and oh-so-bored?

As a single woman, it's disturbing to read another single woman lamenting about how weekends for singles can be a drag and how she envies married folks whose lives are so packed. You feel like being attacked from within, by one of your kind.

It may be a heartfelt article but I urge the writer, even as I urge myself, to use her imagination, creativity and intelligence to seek out the opportunities that the single life offers, has to offer. Challenging as the life of a single already is, why waste energy feeding negative thoughts into your mind? Besides, I believe that life is full of opportunities, whether you are single, married, abled, disabled, rich, poor.

Granted, for some of us, the opportunities that life offers may not be so obvious. But if despite of this, we are able to use our imagination, creativity and intelligence to find something to appreciate about our life, isn't that all the more laudable, all the more inspiring?

Whenever I feel small about my single status, I like to pull myself up by thinking that as a single person, I am in a much better position to empathise with all those living on the margins of society. After all, I am one of them. Just this thought along perks me up and makes me feel a better person.

Don't move in with me

My parents are thinking of moving in with me. I greet the news with silence and ...dare I say it, dismay. I think of the space I have now. The silence. The freedom. All will be gone if they were to move in with me. Or am I being too pessimistic? I think of plotting my escape overseas. But they say the more you run away from a problem, the more it will come back to haunt you. Do I want to believe this? And why is it that, more than any of my siblings, I find my parents' presence so profoundly suffocating?

Father = V.D.P (Very Difficult Person)

Today my father belongs firmly to that dreaded category of "Difficult People In My Life" for
shouting at me in front of my uncle, for no good reason.

Back home, I quickly took out Mark Rosen's Thank You For Being Such A Pain and tried to swallow the following pearls, pills:
1) To understand everything is to forgive everything - French proverb
2) Who is a wise person? One who learns from everyone - Ben Zoma (Pirke Avot 4:1)
3) Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
4) In the school of life, difficult people are the faculty. They teach us our most important spiritual lessons, the lessons that we would be most unlikely to learn on our own.

Now I just have to rack my brains for the important spiritual lesson my father holds for me.

Sleeping with the enemy

How does one cope with all the white noise in one's head?
Whether it's anger or craving or jealousy or fear or depression, the idea is not to try to get rid of it, but to make friends with it. Or so Pema Chodron suggests in her book, The Wisdom of No Escape.

Making friends means to get "to know it completely, with some kind of softness, and learning how, once you've experienced it fully, to let go."

It does not mean (am I glad to hear this) beating myself up for being a bad person. Nor does it mean bolstering myself up by saying, "It's good that I'm this way... Other people are terrible, and I'm right to be so angry at them all the time."

How refreshing is this. So, our hangups are our wealth all along!
According to Chodron, our neurosis and our wisdom are cut out of the same cloth. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom.

Is it really possible for me to befriend my hangups? To make friends with my quick anger at those who tell me what to do with my life, or my smouldering envy at those who dare to speak their mind, those who are prettier, slimmer, smarter etc?

When I am down in the dumps, can I remind myself of Chodron's words, "There isn't any hell or heaven except for how we relate to our world" and that "Hell is just resistance to life.

When I encounter a deadlock and lose my lust for life, can I remind myself of her words that "Life's work is .. to let the things that enter into your circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep". In other words, "to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will. It's going to stick around until you learn your lesson."

As Chodron says, you can manipulate your world until you're blue in the face to try to make it always smooth, but the same old demons will always come up until you have learned your lesson.

Drats.

So, I made a mistake? BIG DEAL!

So, I made a mistake. No big deal. What is life but a comedy of errors? So long as it's not a fatal mistake. Just say sorry, I won't do it again.
Easy, right? So why is it that everytime I make a mistake, I behave like it's the end of the world? I would feel super guilty, apologise profusely, be almost on my knees begging for forgiveness. In other words, do all kinds of things to sabotage myself and make my mistake stick out like a sore thumb so that it makes it tough for the injured party to forgive me even if he wishes to. Will the day ever come when I can laugh at the mistakes I make!?

(In reply to) Rumi's The Guest House

This being human (That's me!) is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
(Yes. This morning, dark thoughts about my mother, my brother and some friends, all arrived, pell-mell.)

A joy, a depression, a meanness
(No joy yet, but a depression and a few meanness-es? You bet!),
some mometary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
(Unexpected? No doubt about this.)

Welcome and entertain them all!
(Huh?! How?!)
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
(Hmm.. cannot think of any delight he may be clearing me out for, unless it is to ignore my mother, strangle my brother and write vicious letters to my friends?)

The dark thought (Yes. My mind is blackish with dark thoughts), the shame (No. No shame yet), the malice (Yes. My eyes are gleaming with malice),
meet them at the door laughing (Huh?! How?!),
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
(Wow, what a punchline! But first, can anyone tell me how in the world can I contort my mind to make it see each of them as a guide from beyond?)

THOSE MONSTROUS STRINGS

It looks innocent enough,
ten colourful strings hanging from a wooden rod,
each a row of fluffy balls in red, orange, purple, blue, yellow.
It makes a pretty screen for the door.
But then the strings tangle easily,
and under my sister's confused hands,
they become a monstrosity, a tangled mess
that takes hours for me to untangle.
A tangled mess,
that is a reflection of my sister's increasingly confused mind,
the mind that is slowly being eaten up
by the tumours growing in her brain.