Transition in Heart and Mind

At this point in my divorced life I have begun to reflect on my marriage and divorce with melancholy equanimity.

There was for me a long period of grief* during which my mind exuded so much negative emotion and, feeding upon itself, thoughts, memories and dreams that released more and more painful emotional experience. It is a cyclone, feeding itself, generating new pain and dredging deeper memories and fears as it grinds and tears in your mind.

As it begins to clear there is a new experience of freedom. It is dry and plain. It is there, was always there. But now it is impressed on the mind as a fact of life to be reminded of daily. The bald, basic facts of divorce and going alone are your aloneness and your freedom. You might jump out of your seat and race for the nearest party place if you had been released from a prison and had this freedom and aloneness. And you would quickly do what we all do, what every freed prisoner does: begin to slice away at your freedom and aloneness as soon as possible -- run from it, build on it, hide it, relinquish it to others, cash it in for a new relationship, pursuit or distraction.

But, back to the desert, where the bereft find themselves. This is where I am. I was not the prisoner escaping a marriage that I had come to view as a jail cell. That was my wife. And she duly ran off to the party, by all accounts. I can't say personally because I can't say as I know her anymore. We are estranged. I have been disowned as husband and friend. I can say, so far, for close to 18 months, that has been the truth.

So where am I going with this? I guess I have been thinking about the earlier writings I did when I was able to articulate ex tempore what I experienced during some of the most intense times of my divorce. What do I do with them? Where do I stand today? How do I incorporate my present and my past? My future would seem to depend on it -- not a future that repeats the past after perhaps 8 more years of blindly running in a circle, but one that asserts a new trajectory with regard to my personal relationships.

A transition in heart and attitude begins to take place naturally. Answers to questions I asked with utmost seriousness and earnestness while suffering the grief of divorce begin to take a more final shape. Ignorance begins to cede to knowledge as grief finally subsides to melancholy reflection. The intense pangs of grief seem to diminish eventually. But the mind is still attracted to the whole experience. Where feeling is no longer the most obvious guide to the mind's activity, the way is cleared for reason and contemplation to satisfy themselves.

It holds much challenge to set your jaw and face this desert landscape for any adult whose life is already filled with responsibilities and challenges. And few in your day to day life will know this desert you are wandering, which is just a quieter, clearer, less tumultuous stretch than that you have already walked. Aloneness accentuates itself given opportunity. Sitting with these things -- aloneness, the freedom, large questions and memories -- while the impetus of life undulates forward in time . . . is very hard to do. But it seems to be possible to some extent, with a little effort. The main effort that seems to be required is to quell the desire to leap away from it all, which is to invent or be graced with the will to see that desire, accept it, yet not act on it.

Well, as I said, aloneness can become accentuated by time. You do need to get out and see people and do things. But there is no rush. "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread," as Alexander Pope said. I've tried leading with my heart. It needs the temper of learning from the past though. And I think that takes some time and contemplation and aloneness. This is me trying to realize the statement from Susan Anderson's The Journey from Abandonment to Healing : Turn the End of a Relationship into the Beginning of a New Life:

It is important to realize that only when you stop fighting the fact that you're alone can you recognize its purpose in your emotional recovery. - p. 80

*I was going to qualify this grief as grief "of divorce," but after reflecting on my experiences and works such as C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, the grief of divorce, for some people at least, is no better, worse or qualitatively different from the grief of death.