Difficulty listening.

It's been so long since I've written here...a shame really when one thinks of it because so much has happened over the past few months. As it turns out, 42 really was a year of big things...more than I could have dreamed of. And big apparently doesn't mean "good", just "great" in the sense of enormous. Biggest of the big:

I found a father and lost one.

I am, of course, at a crossroads. I've been very aware that it was coming and have written of it spasmodically over the last three years. Still, when one is overtaken by an involuntary constriction, even if one knows it is coming, the discomfort is nonetheless intense. The toll and peal of change is ringing now, even as I write these words, and still I tense up, steeling myself against the sound as if my rigidness could stop it's effect.

Sound affects us quite profoundly. My family and I used to do a new-agey experiment to illustrate the impact of sound. First I'd listen to a serene piece of classical music. While listening, I'd raise my arms aloft, and hold them perpendicular to my body. While fixing my arms thusly, my mother or sister would then try to force my arms down. Usually, I could resist.

Then the music would be radically changed to something I hated...acid rock (which I later came to enjoy with a beer) or the like. Again, some one would try to force my arms down...and low and behold, I'd not be able to resist. It was a simplistic demonstration of how we are unwittingly yet concretely impacted by our environment.

This home grown test may not have been that scientific for I could have unconsciously allowed my arms to be pushed down. But whether I were aware or unaware that I participated in the outcome was not the point. The point was that I believed that my arms could be pushed down when listening to something disruptive and cacophonous. I reacted to this input in accord with my belief system.

Placebo effect or not, the result was real and so of course is my current reaction to the force of change...even if I intellectually believed I was well prepared for it-- welcomed it--in all the other senses: mental, emotional, spiritual, physical...the de facto consequences show me to be rather ill-equipped.

I apparently believe that I am ill-equipped to handle the change demanded by my life because I'm bracing for impact rather than rolling with the shock. I also have apparently believed that all the coming change was going to be good...and since some of it decidely has not been pleasant, I've gone and tried to stop the rest of it, as if my resistence would make any difference at all. This change isn't just up to me...it's part of the movement of the cosmos.

I'm at a crossroads...that means, there are choices to be made...there is no straight path to continue down. But I've stopped short at this proverbial fork, terrified by the dissonance I hear in the future and just as certainly deaf to any accompanying harmony, indifferent to how disharmonies can resolve precipitously into symphonies.