Although it is against my will, I admit I have gotten set in my ways.  I have always prided myself on my flexibility of character, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve changed.  It is subtle, though, now I’m set in my psychological ways.  These are hard habits to break.  For one, I’m afraid of being hurt.

I know that changing the habitual ways we think and react to life is how we learn.  Fifteen-year-olds have much more flexible brains than I do, and even high school kids have a hard time allowing their brains to learn something new. I’ve heard you must practice something new twenty times order to learn it. I must ask myself to think differently, to believe I will not be destroyed by hurt so that I can learn to experience my due measure of joy.

Buddha fought many demons that came to him while he was meditating before he reached enlightment.  He faced each of the demons with an open heart, demons such as greed, fear, hypocrisy, and hatred.  He invited his demons in, he looked them in the face and they stayed with him as long as they wanted.  With his compassion and acceptance, one by one they would vanish.  Only by facing my demons, accepting that they are part of us, not shutting them out or fighting them, can I dissipate the suffering they cause me.  They will come back again so each time I invite them in.  If I fight them or shut them out, they will grow powerful.

The power of our demons is like a bully; bullies get a feeling of powerfulness from the fear he or she creates in the victim. That’s their plug-in to power, fear.  Without being plugged in to the power they are just blow-up toys.  You can knock them down and they bounce back up, but eventually they will lose their air, slowly wither and become useless garbage.

Imagine living surrounded by people who have this kind of relationship with their fears.  They wouldn’t be projecting their fears, disguised as aggression and neediness onto others, you and me, but we would all be responsible for ourselves.  No more behaving poorly because of misguided aggressions.  What a peaceful place that would be.

I spent much of my life alternately seeking and avoiding being alone.  When I want it, it is solitude and it’s good, but when I don’t to be alone that solitude becomes loneliness.  I think, “Why in the world would I want to risk caring about anyone?” I am usually convinced that it will just be a matter of time before people hurt me, so how long and to what degree is the gamble. The odds that I will eventually get hurt if I take the chance to get to know someone are 100 percent.  But if I think face my fear of the inevitable let down, I’m ok with it.

Physical pain is easier in some way, like it’s justified suffering.  I’ve learned that emotional pain is weakness of character. Some people choose numbness instead.  They may eat or drink themselves silly, watch endless television or internet, shop obsessively, or bury themselves in work or religion.  Emotions are every bit as painful as physical pain.  An invisible enemy is sometimes more dangerous than those you can see.

She is tall and calm and seems even friendly. She is addressing herself to him though she is introducing herself to me. Brad is clearly agitated.  He doesn’t say much, but his eyes shoot daggers at her.  There’s just the hint of a flinch in her calm.  Meanwhile I am recovering from my speechlessness.  Many events last for only seconds in our lives but the results seem to last a lifetime.

I’m sitting at a little tavern table with him after a casual movie date.    We are having a relaxed time, just sharing a beer after the movie, talking it over.  It’s quiet in there, a Thursday night.  I am young and naïve and unfailingly proper, so I simply say “Hello” to this woman.  She vanishes almost as quickly as she appeared. I state the only thing that can be said.

“I didn’t know you were married.”

“We’re separated,” he says quickly, offering no more explanation than that.

It’s time to go home then.  He takes me home and I hop out of the car into the dark and chilly night and head into my house.

He calls me the next day and leaves a message with my roommate for me to call him. The only thought that crosses my mind when I get the message is, “I’m a nice girl.  I don’t go out with married men.”  I don’t call him back.

I have a crummy memory for many things that matter to other people.  Specifics elude me on a regular basis.  But this memory is word for word.  The dim light, the time of day, and the tension in the air, are all seared in my memory, a scene from the story of my life.  I had a little flame in my heart for him but it glowed only weakly after this incident.  I thought little of him unless I saw him.  But a flame was there, smoldering, fanned later into a torch. There was another man in my life in those days and the love I had for him was my first passionate obsession and that one lasted many years.

Over the next 15 years I saw Brad off and on when I went into his family business in town.  He would usually show me flirtatious, solicitous interest.  So obviously did he flirt that when once I went in and he did not pay me attention, I was hurt.  I wondered why he was different that time.  I’d liked him from the first moment I saw him.  You may know that feeling.  He exudes an aura that catches your eye and without warning you know you desire him and you want him to want you.

I know now that he ignored me that day because he was cheating on his wife Sarah, preparing to run away with his second wife, ending his first marriage once and for all.  When I let my life be a part of someone else’s, I feel their values become in part a reflection of me and so I care very much how they behave. I did not date married men, yet I forgave him for failing to tell me the whole truth.  That’s the beginning of my obsession with him.

His business burned down a few years later.  I stood on a street corner downtown watching the smoke plumes with a friend like so many other people did that day.  I said to her, “I know the owner of that business.  He’s a friend of mine. I feel so bad that this happened to him.”  Later when people questioned if it was a case of arson, I defended him in my heart as well as aloud.  Defending people you love is a sort of primal response.  It’s very difficult to separate reason from fact when you love someone.

Another five years pass.  I see his handsome face on a dating service.  I e-mail him, “Hi. I think I know you.”  He asks me to go to coffee.  When I open the door to meet him, he is so thrilled to see me he practically doubles over with pleasure.  “I wasn’t sure if it was you or another woman I used to know.  I was hoping it was you.”  He looks great; the ironed shirt gets me gets me every time.  Men don’t know that, do they?  If you iron your shirt, it will melt a woman’s heart.  As he leaves me at the end of that date he says, “You’re going to be seeing me a lot.  I’m not going to let you go again.”  I had a bruised and lonely heart could hear no sweeter words.  Oh the love burned bright in my heart again.

It’s been a lot of years since that night in the tavern. I have to ask him about it, though.  It is a case of integrity.  Values are not separated easily from a person, they’re part of the whole package.  He answers my question, “I was so hurt that you never called me back.”  I say, “But you were married!  I was a good girl.  I would never go out with a married man.”  He goes on to tell me the horrid tale of Sarah cheating with his best friend.  It’s hard not to feel sorry for him then, they must have really been separated for a very good reason, I think.  He glides lightly over the fact that they then go on to have two children and stay married for another ten years.  A second wife and another failed marriage later, he’s finally really free to be mine.  And I couldn’t be more pleased.

Oh it’s fun to be in love. Finally all the good things I have done in my life are paying off.  We look great together. He spends all his time at my house.  Once in a while we are at his house, and there is a strange dark feeling being in new man’s house.  All their possessions are unfamiliar, it feels like events have taken place that you may not want to think about, much less know about.  Private things. Another woman has been here.  It’s very difficult to suspend the discomfort but I act like it’s all okay.  One day when I’m looking for an earring I dropped, I find a lipstick under his bed.  It is a nice lipstick, clearly a woman’s, not his daughter’s.  When I show it to him he says contemptuously, “That must be my last girlfriend’s. She probably left it there on purpose.  That’s just the sort of thing she would do.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“She’d leave that lipstick there so it would be found later.”

I am quizzical.  What does he mean by that?  When you’re in love, you simply do not see your beloved’s flaws.  If you really know how to love, that is.  You almost envision them in a cloud of light.  They are alive in your mind’s eye.  You reach out to them in your heart a thousand times a day.  You hear their voice whispering along with you every moment.  You think of what you will say to them when you see them again.  When you do see each other, the embraces!  The nearness of your loved one is irresistible.  You follow them like a magnet with your own body.  They move from your sight and you cannot concentrate on anything else until they are again next to you. You are in love.

When I love, I am consumed with his happiness.  I am consumed with him being happy with me. I want him to adore me in just the way I adore him. My passion is boundless about everything he thinks and likes and does.

What’s the difference between love and obsession?  Popular psychologists could be right and obsession in love could be just another addiction, a response to childhood and emotional trauma.  Love can certainly cause emotional trauma.  All those thousands of profoundly moving love stories prove that love is real, is a little obsessive and even painfully moving. Anna Karenina.  Gone with the Wind.  Pride and Prejudice. Romeo and Juliet. It’s a hard fact that love can cause pain.  Desire. Joy.  Completion. Peace.. A connection so strong it’s spiritual; you want to be together for all eternity.  And as life does, there’s a shift.  There comes an end to the passionate bloom of love. You cannot just let go of love like loosening your grip on a rope as you push off from the dock in a boat.

I looked up the definitions of dream in several reference sources.  The focus of the older texts defined dream only as the symbolic images that the mind produces while the body is asleep.  More modern texts start with the definition of the involuntary images and sensations of sleeping dream but add the explanation of dreams as deep aspiration and longing for achievement.

Then a movie that I ordered months earlier arrived in my mailbox. I don’t get around to watching movies very often, so it sat on a bench in my hall for a couple of days before I opened the movie because I was tired and wanted an excuse to escape for an hour.  I put in the movie and it was an unusual story of a man’s dreams.  The main character is having vivid pleasurable dreams every night, but meanwhile his waking days are a nightmare of success turned into a disappointing reality.  I couldn’t help but notice the recurrence of the dream theme in the passage of a past few days in my own life.  I was paying attention now.

How separate are our nighttime dreams from our ambitious dreams?  I searched online for articles online about ambitious dreams.  The main advice was to make a list of your ambitious dreams and to prioritize the list in order to find your goal.  When did we become a nation of list makers?  People’s dreams for their life have become little more than objectives. The vision for our lives should be honored as noble and deeply human, not just dog-pack dynamics.  Dreams give us purpose. My dreams keep me going, they keep me afloat.

When I was about twelve I started to entertain what I thought were strange notions.  Now I work as a teacher and hear my students do the same thing as they develop rational thinking.  It’s one of the great moments in my teaching when I am talking about writing style and I casually mention to my 14 year old students that in fact the ending to their short story should not be, “And then I woke up and it was all a dream.”  They chorus “No.  Why not?”  They look deeply disappointed.  This reaction plays out the same way every year.  I explain that attributing strange and exciting events to a dream does not fix weak writing in which all the plot pieces don’t fit together.  Then I let them in on a secret of life, that life is not a dream. We talk about life, about the weird, surprising, difficult and wonderful things that actually happen are enough to make life interesting all by itself.

We talk about the difficult questions of fate and choice. I tell them that I know they mgith sometimes have questions about reality and I assure them life is not a dream, it’s very real.  They always get the same look on their faces, a shy transparency that says “Yea.  I wondered about that sometimes.”  That’s when I remind them to appreciate and learn from writers’ understanding and observation, his or her ability to let us inside a character’s experience.  Then I can see my students get excited with the thrill of seeing art and knowing it’s good and knowing that they know what’s good.  I’m happy that I have completed two of my own goals for them, to appreciate literature and remember to live a meaningful and reflective life. As they begin to understand that life is indeed real they begin to have at least some hand in the outcomes of their life story and they begin to develop their dreams hopes and ambitions for their life.

We have our unconscious dreams at night, our ambitious dreams during the day.  Our dreams are mysterious, hopeful and only for the living. Both our daytime dreams and our sleeping dreams can be beautiful and liberating at times or they can cause fear and anxiety.  We need to have them.  It helps to remember them, but we really don’t spend that much time thinking about them because we are busy creating them.

I like to observe and evaluate the world around me.  In my job that world is often filled with thirteen and fourteen-year-olds, and quite often their parents as well.  I have observed what I believe to be the long-term effect of the preferential treatment we have given children for the past 30 years.  Many of he kids and their parents are angrier, more spoiled and less able to handle the need to wait for or work for what they want.

Most of my experience has been as a teacher at a very nice school in a middle class neighborhood but I do have a range of teaching experiences. I spent three years substitute teaching and I have worked at schools in desperate poverty, so I have other experiences to compare this observation with. The poor schools and the kids who attend them people do not really even have a chance.  They literally live moment to moment, and the evaluation of students’ ability to meet educational standards is just another hoop for the school to jump through to get funding.

But the white, middle class students and the families that I work with are experienced at achievement. These people pursue winning relentlessly.  They have conviction that their children are exceptional and they will settle for nothing but being the best.  They act as if their lives depend on proving that their child’s abilities exceed all others and that it is critical that other people who touch the lives of their children realize and act in accordance with what they believe is their child’s exceptional skill.  The more money a family has the more this is the case, and our school is filled with families with lots of disposable cash.  Parents will often fight tooth and nail to ensure that grades reflect what they believe is their child’s “above average” ability, regardless of what their child’s real skills or interests are.  How in the world can everyone deserve an A?  The more money the family has, the higher the pressure to be number one.  Many of these parents do not really seem to care about what and how their child is learning but instead behave as if a grade reflects the value of their child.  Does the balance in your bank account determine your value? Maybe to many Americans it does but I don’t agree with that attitude.

So if their child is not really a top student, they often use a “man behind the curtain” strategy to convince everyone that they are the great and powerful Oz.  They wheedle, they threaten, and they scheme. They bully the teachers and the administrators. But I know that if you try to bamboozle everyone into thinking that you are wonderful instead of actually being wonderful, you spend your time maintaining the false image, not earning the title through actual performance.

Many of these kids have learned to be the center of attention and are teen-aged tyrants.  Some of the most charming and agreeable of my students demand a sort of educational spoon-feeding.  For example, every day I tell students exactly what to do to complete an assignment through all-class instruction, modeling, and written directions.  Instantly after I present the lesson and give the instructions for completing the assignment, the demands for personalized repeat instructions begins.  I run around the room repeating instructions to very capable students who do not have any trouble doing A level work, but they want the attention of my individual assistance to tell them one-on-one as if they 1) can’t be bothered to pay attention in class, 2) they want a guarantee that they have it exactly right (they always do already anyway) or 3) to reassure them that I am there to serve their every need.

“What page are we on?”

“I just told you it’s page 47 and it’s written on the board.”

“What do I do?”

“I just taught a lesson about it for the last 20 minutes and the instructions are also written right there on the board.  Were you listening?  Can you see the board o.k.? “

“Oh.  Yea.  Page 47.”  Student starts working furiously and cranks out another excellent paper.

They demand a special message from me, to explain it to them and only them.  I have little time left to actually help students who need it.  Or often I prepare in-depth lesson plans and specialized instructions for students who are going on extended family vacations to Hawaii, Mexico or Europe.  Even though they will miss school to go on a family pleasure vacation they want a guarantee that their child will not be held accountable for work they miss while they are on their vacation.  I spent a disproportionate amount of my time preparing and allowing for kids who have not done their work when it was first assigned and want special treatment later to ensure that they get an A.  It’s not too hard to see that when I spend my time on this sort of thing for the well-off, capable and off-task, I cannot spend my time with students who are truly in need of help, such as those with learnng problems, disrupted and chaotic lives or other difficulities.

Our system has allowed the development of these demanding, over-protective parents and kids who believe that they are entitled to get straight A’s simply because they demand it.  The term “helicopter parents” is apt.  These are parents who hover over their children, manipulating and interfering in order to ensure their child will achieve perfect success and a perfect image.

Well-meaning schools and parents have created and fed and nurtured this monstrous situation.  I worry about what will come of our country.  I worry that my children, raised to be humble and work to pay their own way and build their own reputation, will be left to take care of these demanding citizens.  Will my kids and others like them have to build all the bridges and cure all of the illness and take care of the next generation of spoiled, clueless kids, because we’ve allowed this attitude to flourish?  We must discuss how to get ourselves out of the hole into which we’ve dug ourselves, to give kids realistic grades and evaluations, to hold them responsible for their behavior and not to worry about hurting them when we do that. I believe we are hurting everyone if we don’t.

Well, of course some people only want new things. Some want a valuable old objects that have been finely preserved, maybe even with no signs of use.  Who wants something that shows signs of use, that may even have chips, cracks and creases?  I know some people do.  We all keep many things, even many useless things, from our own families.  But they are invaluable to us.  We even hunt for vintage treasures in second-hand stores. These things are valuable because they bring us close to human feelings, history, a story or a mystery.  Maybe I find an old item.  I can see that it was clearly made well enough to be useful, and was loved in its use by someone, maybe several owners.  Is that a patina of love?  Can it be shined up, polished and buffed under the dulled finish? So I carefully clean up the thing, appreciating the beauty of the original piece, the picture of experiences long ago.  The whole piece shows a new a charm that no slick, new knock-off has earned.

Age fades everything, too.  It seems that we get lighter and lighter and then according to cultural legend, eventually we become nothing but light.  Appreciating the lightness of aging is the trick.  The gray hair, the thinning skin that shows us a view of veins we never before saw make us a sort of otherworldly creature.

Sometimes I miss the vibrancy of youth in full bloom when I look in the mirror or at other people in my age group.  I am still becoming accustomed to seeing us faded.   Our white hair glows like a bright halo, or maybe our bald heads reflect the light. I know I will not join the surprising number of over 40′s who change their appearance with various kinds of surgeries or procedures.  I am far too fascinated with nature to miss this chance to see first hand, in excrutiating detail, how a human body changes with age, time and wear.  We are becoming the light.

A friend told me a few weeks ago that she did not approve of “judgmentalism.”  At the time I was not sure why it bothered me, but it stuck with me for a few days, and it became more clear to me after that night at the judge’s table.    Enjoying art is an ongoing process of judgment.  Take music, for example. We hear it, we know if we like it, the more we know and care about it, the more we listen carefully and judge it.  We say, and we know, “that’s good.”  Judging is not a bad thing, it is a creative thing, engaged with the world, participating in the vibrancy of being alive.  Judge away!  Make the world a better and more interesting place!

One of my favorite modern urban slang catch phrases in the past few years is “Recognize!”  I have been using it since I first heard my students using it in the 90′s.  It’s a way of saying, “see me. ” I would rather have people “recognize” me than to blandly accept me or anyone else.  Acceptance is peaceful and soothing in concept, but acceptance is not the lack of judgment.  Please judge me!  Otherwise you will probably not be noticing me, or all that crazy stuff I do every day to try to be original, to help make the world a better place in a gazillion tiny instances.

I think I’ve lived an insulated life, surrounded by people who practice honesty.  Dishonesty, whether large and obvious, in intent, or even in small, everyday incidents, is not the way I normally act.  I am exhausted by the everyday lack of integrity and institutional dishonesty in our lives.  It takes so much effort to adjust for the lies and deceptive intent that surrounds us.

Take a look at the financial crisis, fueled by dishonesty in home loans.  It’s easy to point the finger at the financial institutions, and they deserve it, but all those U.S. consumers lied to themselves and to each other as well.  Dishonesty runs deep in our way of life.  I think it’s time to change it and I think it’s going to take some effort, and honesty.