continuous
It's amazing, isn't it - - no it isn't, it is not amazing, it isn't even surprising, how what comes as personal crisis causes one's consciousness to shift from interest and concern about externals - - politics, election, wars, college football, &c - - I didn't realize the extent of it until last Saturday when it occurred to me that this was the first time in maybe sixty-five years that I was sitting and calmly, without getting upset, watching UF lose their game. Maybe it's the "gallows syndrome," that nothing so singularly focuses the mind as the sound of sawing and hammering outside the cell window of a condemned man. Or that final sixty seconds of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's mock execution when he knew he had less than a minute to live.
Between services yesterday a priest came, Paul, as announced, to a surprisingly well attended gathering, a forum it turned out to be, about what is happening to us. All who wanted to told their short story of where they were during the storm, and their experience. It was emotionally draining. And interestingly, it seems to me that we are not "all in this together" so much as each of us is in a personal trauma sort of individual crisis that keeps on, it isn't over, it keeps on happening as the difference between continual and continuous that doesn't clarify until you get there. It doesn't end. Even sitting on the balcony of a lovely gulf front condominium, looking down on a white sand beach and out over the calm to where sea meets sky does not soothe it away: the stress is terrible.
In the "for every loss there is a gain" formula and psychotherapy, what's the gain? Maybe for one thing, better to realize how that middle-easterner feels as he wanders stunned and confused among the ruins of the bombed out war torn city where he grew up, that was his home and peace. Not joining the young bright and smiley chipper chinuppers, I'm counting better appreciation of others as my gain. Appreciation, understanding, care.
And why us, me? Why not me, us?
November: I had forgotten the fog. With daylight, it's solid white outside. The sun may burn it off by midmorning.
T
Between services yesterday a priest came, Paul, as announced, to a surprisingly well attended gathering, a forum it turned out to be, about what is happening to us. All who wanted to told their short story of where they were during the storm, and their experience. It was emotionally draining. And interestingly, it seems to me that we are not "all in this together" so much as each of us is in a personal trauma sort of individual crisis that keeps on, it isn't over, it keeps on happening as the difference between continual and continuous that doesn't clarify until you get there. It doesn't end. Even sitting on the balcony of a lovely gulf front condominium, looking down on a white sand beach and out over the calm to where sea meets sky does not soothe it away: the stress is terrible.
In the "for every loss there is a gain" formula and psychotherapy, what's the gain? Maybe for one thing, better to realize how that middle-easterner feels as he wanders stunned and confused among the ruins of the bombed out war torn city where he grew up, that was his home and peace. Not joining the young bright and smiley chipper chinuppers, I'm counting better appreciation of others as my gain. Appreciation, understanding, care.
And why us, me? Why not me, us?
November: I had forgotten the fog. With daylight, it's solid white outside. The sun may burn it off by midmorning.
T