Moojinorbit

I promised I’d let Blogging Nanny at the computer this morning even if it meant leaving my house a little messy before I fly to Chicago for the muy, muy exciting American Political Science Association conference. That’s the event that gathers 6,500 political scientists together for an intimate 5-days’ worth of peyote-induced vision quests, naked dancing, and secret moon rituals. I wish. Can you imagine that many dorks with bad fashion in one place? It’s harrowing, really, and it used to scare the bejeezus out of me, make me wonder why the heck I chose to get advanced degrees in this discipline. But now that I’ve carved out my little happy place inside so-called political science (I prefer to call myself a student of politics, sort of), I can deal with APSA. I mainly look forward to it for the chance to hang out with my grad school crew and post-doc friends. Jumping on the hotel bed with Manic Kevvy shouting nonsense and giggling, which usually happens, is not bad either.

This year I’m going to shop an edited volume I’m doing with a colleague and present a paper on a panel that came out of that project. And E’s going to join me for part of the weekend, so I’ll have a date to run away with when I can’t handle the Night of the Living Dead hordes any longer. Maybe we’ll escape to a museum or a blues bar or something.

Summer’s almost over and school’s about to go ballistic, with me teaching an extra class so as to free winter quarter up to work on book revisions. I’m having trouble getting my mind around everything cranking up again, but with students starting to write on my FaceBook wall saying, “how was [was!] your summer?” it’s unavoidable. At least I’ve come to think of the day after Labor Day as my New Year, so I’m trying to just calm down and think in terms of the resolutions I want to make and the good things coming in the next 12 months. If I get a book contract this year on my own book (not the edited vol), I may seriously be able to move into the baby-making process.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been learning a lot lately, even as life’s been a whirlwind and things seem to be blowing up all over the place with my friends and their relationships. Learning a lot about myself and my own deep fears and the patterns I create from them. Getting a handle on the difference between what I should and shouldn’t take personally from other people (yeah, like I’m not going to have to relearn that a million times). Watching dear, dear ones struggle and suffer and grow. Remembering how much growth can, indeed, emerge from suffering, or from becoming conscious during a suffering process. Loving you guys, loving all of you so much. So appreciative of your honesty and courage, grateful that you lean on me from time to time. Grateful for your models of consciousness, even when you freak or break and run and tell me about it later. Even when you cried all night long. I love you, my friends.

I was in a room recently with Julie Colwell, a brilliant therapist, who said something I found profoundly paradigm-shifting. “An unhealthy commitment,” she said, “is ’til death do us part.’ Nobody knows the future; we can’t know what will happen in the end, or who we’ll be.”

I was thinking, Whoa. She’s basically saying that the very thing everybody commits to when they get married is an unhealthy commitment. So what should people say at the altar? What should everybody hope for?

“A healthy commitment is to the process,” she continued. So exactly what process is that, Dr. Wedding Ruiner?

“To the willingness to be transparent with your feelings in your relationship. To be honest. To show up every day. To be brave enough to know yourself and share that with the people you love. To grow.”

Oh. Even if it means you might not stay together in the long-term, because you need to grow in different directions. Even if it means your security is not based on promises and plans and a perceived future. Even if it’s really, really vulnerable. Even when it means you’re stripped. But those moments can be the good part, the depth that touches water. Committing to the process, not the end point, one little bit at a time.

Okay, then. Off to bite off this next chunk of the process.