as I live a few more questions

Moving Forward

Trying out the Write word-processing software from the OpenOffice 1.1 suite (on Linux, of course). It compares quite favourably with Microsoft Word in its functionality. I decided that if I was to write something it'd better be something more meaningful than several iterations of "the quick brown fox leaped over the sleeping dog", so I wrote a sort of taking-stock:

It has been a long, long time since I updated my personal mission statement, and part of me feels that I should rip it up and restart from scratch. I feel I have been wandering for the past decade, and that I have been especially aimless this last thirteen months. I've gained a lot of insight about myself, necessary insight for me to take the time to ponder and incorporate, but still it's time to move forward.

I do know what three areas I have to focus on, and unsurprisingly, all three areas are interrelated.

Motivation: Giving up the foundational people-pleasing motivation I learned as a child has been difficult, and I have often failed to get rid of it completely. But now I face a new challenge: replacing a failed externally-oriented motivation with one that is generated from within.

Self-Discipline: My childish willfulness and impulsiveness have clearly impaired my ability to accomplish tasks both at home and at work. I need to better distinguish between what I want to do, and what I need to do. Of particular importance here is my physical self-care.

Spirituality: I have now been “between churches” for 18 months, and I know that I have neglected to feed my soul. I have to stop ignoring the resources I already have, and I need to investigate and research other ways and means to reignite my connection to the numinous.

Oh yes, and I also need to restrain my overwhelming urge to bitch-slap religious fundamentalists of all flavours. I don't want to become the same as the people I dislike, now do I?

Oh God, I have so much left to do, and I'm already feeling creaky in the knees.

Humbling

It has been humbling (and painful beyond belief) to realize that I need to focus on one key thing in my life: my foundation is cracked.

I'm serious.

I've spent most of the last eight years (1997-2005) trying to build up a network and an identity for myself, failing and flailing as I go along, digging myself deeper and deeper into a pit of my own making.

And it is only the hard way that I've learned that I can't work on the higher-up stuff without dealing with the lower-down stuff first. The fundamentals, the foundational stuff that needs to be stable and strong for you to build upon.

For example, I can now see that it's pointless to try and make a romantic relationship work when I can't even love myself.

It's useless to work myself up over not getting what I think I deserve, because life is *not* fair and there is *no* contract that says, if you follow all the "rules", that you will get what you want. People are not always going to follow the Golden Rule, and God is not some celestial vending machine.

And it's deadly dangerous to suppress parts of yourself so severely, that you land up with a continuous "background process" running in your brain, constantly at work to keep those parts out of your consciousness, in order to "save" yourself. Because in "saving" myself I just burdened myself even more. Being blind to yourself as you really are is worse than any prison.

And that it's better to have a smaller number of closer friends than a Rolodex packed full of acquaintances. One minor miracle of the past eight months has been to realize that I don't have to *do* anything to be loved and valued; I just have to accept that I already *am* loved and valued (even if I don't see things from the same perspective as my friends and family do).

I have to focus on the little things before I can expect to achieve the bigger things in life. Which means accepting that I have cracks in my foundation, areas which were slapped together and now need to be repaired properly before I can move forward.

Painful. Humbling. But necessary.

"Having an individual who is making 100 or 200 or 300 times more than the average person working on the floor is wrong."

Why I shop at Costco instead of Wal-Mart, neatly incapsulated by Joey deVilla, of the blog The Adventures of Accordian Guy in the 21st Century.

Going Back In Time: A Tale of Two Ryans

I've had a chance to reread blog entries I'd never thought I'd read again, and contemplate the many changes that have taken place in my life since I first started this blog in September 2003. And the significant impact that this blog, this thing, has had on my life, the amazing assortment of people that I have gotten to know through this medium and how our lives have intersected.

And I realize that there are, in fact, not one but two Ryans: the online Ryan and the offline Ryan. They overlap but are not necesarily the same person.

The online Ryan is both braver and more foolhardy than the offline Ryan, more likely to speak up for a cause or address an injustice.

The online Ryan is is chattier, more likely to interject with a comment or a joke than the offline Ryan. He's both merrier and more despondent, angrier and sorrier, than his offline counterpart.

(Amazingly) The online Ryan is more gregarious than the offline Ryan, effortlessly moving from node to node in myriad social networks, juggling dozens of contacts ranging from nodding acquaintances to bosom buddies and making it look easy.

The offline Ryan—the real Ryan from which the online Ryan springs—is in reality a quieter, soberer, lonelier person. It's almost as if I feel I have to inflate myself into a carnival version of who I am, to make that mark on others. Why? I already know how useless this strategy is in real life; why do I pursue it online?

*sigh* Another question to live, right? It's a perfect example of how you can look at yourself through a blog, and see things that you never realized before.

Maybe I'm bolder online because I'm afraid I'll just wash out in the blare of the blogosphere, my voice drowned out by other, stronger, voices. That no one will hear me. The offline Ryan already knows that it doesn't matter who hears me; what matters is that I hear myself. It's odd that the online Ryan hasn't learned that yet.

Enneagram Two: "Why I Suddenly Went Missing"

Continuing on from where I left off...

Simply put, Enneagram Twos are all about love and pride. At their best and finest, Twos exemplify altruism, the humble and selfless giving of the self to others (think Mother Teresa). They can be valuable teachers of humanity and love (think Leo Buscaglia, Ann Landers). At their worst, they are manipulative, histrionic, possessive, and self-deluded (think Princess Diana, especially during her unhappy marriage; many would classify her as another personality type, but I found in talking with other Enneagram enthusiasts over at the Enneagram Institute discussion board that those who had actually met her in person say she's a Two, and I believe it).

Obviously, most Twos fall somewhere between the two extremes :-)

The key here is helping; Twos are the helpers, driven to see themselves as helpful people. They want people to depend on them; they need to be needed. Twos are all about emotional (heart) energy projected outwards, with very little directed inward to the self. They can be uncannily skilled at "reading" other people's emotional states and responding accordingly, but they often can't "read" themselves and their underlying motives. To other Enneagram personality types, average-to-unhealthy Twos can come across as insincere, even ridiculous, in their desire to be helpful, needed, and loved (think Richard Simmons).

Fulfilling other people's needs gives the Enneagram Two a sense of pride (sometimes even a false sense of entitlement), something that most Twos would hotly deny because it conflicts with their self-view as "helpful". Average-to-unhealthy Twos hate looking at their real motivations, which essentially are pride in what they do for others. Usually they cover it up to others (and often to themselves) as "being helpful to others" as a goal in itself... but it's the ego strokes that Twos get for doing this work that are the real payoff. Pride can run rampant in unhealthy Twos, and the unhealthier the Two the more they try to repress their self-knowledge of what drives them. The unhealthiest Twos are extremely manipulative and also completely self-deluded about how "good" they really are; they can casue immense destruction and still think of themselves as "saints".

The problem with pride-serving people-pleasing is that, ultimately, the Two does not know whether he/she is unconditionally loved for who he/she is, or loved just for what she/he does for other people. This fear of being unloved can lead to manipulative behaviour as the Two seeks appropriate "tokens" of love and gratitude from others in order to calm their fears. Ironically, just like every other Enneagram personality type, the Two can bring about the one thing most feared as they become more stressed out and unhealthy: people will resist the manipulation and possessiveness, and will begin to pull away.

A Case For Civility In An Increasingly Incivil Age

A timely column on civility in an increasingly incivil age (from Blake at LISNews)

But what I still can't get used to is that so many people don't want to offer a conflicting opinion; they want to inflict a wound. Snide, sarcastic, belittling, profane—you name it. The intent is to sting, not discuss.

And it always makes me sad. Not for myself, but for us. Where does this road end? (Blow, S. 'Here's a refreshing idea: Choose civility', DallasNews.com (The Dallas Morning News), June 19, 2004)

My Mirror

It's a quarter after midnight, and I'm still up, still thinking. I'm still feeling flabbergasted and a little overwhelmed by all the strong opinions and feelings that the twists and turns of the Plain Layne saga have unleashed, both in myself and in others. If it is the mark of a good artist to have moved his audience, then the author behind Plain Layne has certainly accomplished his goal.

Eudaemonia: Happiness is Flow; and a Comparison of Virtues

Quote from an interview with Dr. Martin Seligman, President of the American Psychological Association (from The Edge):

The second one is eudaemonia, the good life, which is what Thomas Jefferson and Aristotle meant by the pursuit of happiness. They did not mean smiling a lot and giggling. Aristotle talks about the pleasures of contemplation and the pleasures of good conversation. Aristotle is not talking about raw feeling, about thrills, about orgasms. Aristotle is talking about what Mike Csikszentmihalyi works on, and that is, when one has a good conversation, when one contemplates well. When one is in eudaemonia, time stops. You feel completely at home. Self-consciousness is blocked. You're one with the music.

The good life consists of the roots that lead to flow. It consists of first knowing what your signature strengths are and then recrafting your life to use them more—recrafting your work, your romance, your friendships, your leisure, and your parenting to deploy the things you're best at. What you get out of that is not the propensity to giggle a lot; what you get is flow, and the more you deploy your highest strengths the more flow you get in life.

Coming out this month as part of the DSM is a classification of strengths and virtues; it's the opposite of the classification of the insanities. When we look we see that there are six virtues, which we find endorsed across cultures, and these break down into 24 strengths. The six virtues that we find are non-arbitrary—first, a wisdom and knowledge cluster; second, a courage cluster; third, virtues like love and humanity; fourth, a justice cluster; fifth a temperance, moderation cluster; and sixth a spirituality, transcendence cluster. We sent people up to northern Greenland, and down to the Masai, and are involved in a 70-nation study in which we look at the ubiquity of these. Indeed, we're beginning to have the view that those six virtues are just as much a part of human nature as walking on two feet are.

Fascinating reflections. As an exercise, I tried to see if I could create links between the Nine Virtues of the Enneagram, and the six virtues enumerated by Dr. Seligman:

• "first, a wisdom and knowledge cluster": I belive this would correlate to the Enneagram Four (the artist) and the Enneagram Five (the thinker, the investigator, the innovator, the troubleshooter).
  
• "second, a courage cluster": Courage is the virtue of the Enneagram Six. This could also be said to apply to the Enneagram Eight (the challenger, the leader type).
  
• "third, virtues like love and humanity": This is the domain of the Enneagram Two (the lover, the caretaker, the altruist).
  
• "fourth, a justice cluster": This is clearly in the domain of the Enneagram One (the reformer, crusader, activist, and moralist type) and also the Enneagram Three (whose virtue is Veracity or Truth).
  
• "fifth a temperance, moderation cluster": Sobriety is the virtue of the Enneagram Seven.
  
• "and sixth a spirituality, transcendence cluster": This is the Enneagram Nine (the optimist, the reconciler, the peacemaker and peace-seeker, the utopian), that which encompasses and includes all of the other types.
  

Wow, the two sets of virtues actually correlate well with each other.

More Than My Fair Share of Second Chances

(Update Mar. 23/04: I've decided to delete most of this post—an excerpt from the letter I wrote—from the blog. It's just too personal for me to share. There's that boundaries thing again, damn it!

Last night I drafted and emailed a letter to an ex-boyfriend, to apologize for the way in which I broke up with him. At the end I added:

P.S. I'm the happiest I've been in six years, after a lot of hard work and more than my fair share of second chances... I hope that you are happy too; you deserve to be happy."

It's true; despite the moans and groans that get posted on this blog, overall I am the happiest I've been in a long, long time. Maybe I needed the bitch-slap-from-God of the car accident to realize that, too. I am one lucky sonofabitch; in a lot of parallel universes (� la Star Trek), I would be dead by now, and I know it.

Epiphanies

Sedalina has opted to reclaim the original name for her blog: Plain Layne. And in this post Layne talks about epiphanies: "waking up" and finding things out about yourself that you couldn't/wouldn't see before, significant things that require you to do the work to change them (which is the hard part :-)...

I am willing to bet money that Layne's an Enneagram Two: The Helper personality type. A lot of how she talks about herself and her realtionships just clicks with me (another Enneagram Two): Twos define themselves by the network of relationships around them; they define themselves through other people's eyes. And Layne's epiphany is that she is starting to see the downside of this approach, this stance, to her life and her world.