Scaling the wall.

Right now, if anyone asked me to define life, I'd say it is an internal struggle that seeks to right itself. I often wonder why I struggle at all. It is the opposite of acceptance. It arises from judgement. Back to square one then.

When a guy told me recently that picking a bride was 'a privilege he gave his parents', I struggled with that one for a long time. I applied all my high spiritual thoughts. This involves techniques such as putting yourself in the others shoes, looking at the world through their eyes, justifying another's perspective, or failing all that, blindly making peace with the sentiment. As is often the case, I failed miserably.

Every time I fail, I struggle all over again- how do I accept my non-acceptance? You see the vicious circle? Not only do I judge the other, I judge myself for doing so. On and on it goes. I read in my psychology textbook that high achievers/perfectionists are very prone to psychosomatic illnesses. That explains a lot. Bring on the strait jacket and point me to my padded cell.

In effect, I am already a prisoner of my thoughts. The knowledge is not comforting, to say the least. If I didn't have to listen to people say things like the privilege statement above, would I fare better? But that sounds fundamentally wrong to me. I feel we are here to learn from each other. But it isn't easy. Is this why serious forms of meditation call for isolation? So that you don't receive input from the outside world that you end up struggling with? Then that is what I need. A dear friend went through a Vipassana course recently, one that I've planned for a couple of months from now. I hope good things will come off it since it is 10 days of near absolute silence. Sounds like sheer bliss.... Unless I end up bawling my eyes out the whole time. Then it would be hell - more so for the other people in the course. They'll probably have to put me in a padded cell again.

Sometime I wish people would talk about this 'under the surface' stuff more, instead of about movies or family stuff or relationships. That's all very interesting, of course, and I love it, but I find myself dying to push through and ask things like, "How does that make you feel about yourself? How do you deal with it? How do you accept it? Why does it hurt? " I want to learn, dammit. I want to know. But the walls are always there. They have a big black and white label that says 'personal'. Or a fluorescent sign that says 'pride'. Sometime it's a sad little sign that reads 'afraid of being hurt'. I'm afraid too, of that wall inside people. When I touch it, people shy away, sometimes never to return. I wish we were all more vulnerable with each other. That we dared to be.

No, I don't like walls. Padded or otherwise.