Learning to Fly/Fall

A couple months ago, I was at a poly meet where many newbies were present.  A strong theme was regarding how to keep yourself, and your existing relationship, safe as a person exploring polyamory. One experienced soul said that safety was an illusion, and to just let go of the idea of having a "safe" environment. On the surface, that kind of bothered me.  Part of our job as individuals is addressing our own safety, right?

Watching high trapeze artists, one notices the athleticism, the coordination, the sychronicity, the skin tight outfits, the grace, and, perhaps less obviously, the net.  You see, even with a seasoned professional who has been practicing the art of trapeze for many years in coordination with others, the reality is that someone, someday, is going to fall.  There will be a misplaced hand, a slightly under/over powered maneuver, an off day.  The more complexity, the more people involved in the act, the more likely it is to have a missed connection, the more important the net becomes.   No one really wants to be at the show where a smashed skull is part of the entertainment. No one wants to BE that show!

For me, polyamory is managed risk.  I've tried some pretty freakin' challenging things, and sometimes the hands were there to catch me, and other times, I've fallen on my ass.  I want that net!

But what is a net in polyamory?  It's the skills you learn to support yourself, even when things don't go according to plan, because they won't always.  It's building the tenacity to climb the ladder again, grab the bar, and swing yourself into space in rhythm with other people, knowing that some days, some months, some years, are going to be spent falling over and over, as you attempt to learn a complex sequence together.  It's learning to assess who is going to catch you, and who isn't. It's being honest with yourself about who wants to put the work in, and who isn't going to train hard enough to be capable of the more complex stunts. It's knowing when you need to swing out there on your own, and just practice hanging onto the bar, finding your own rhythm.

The net isn't external.  It's internal.   When your internal net is strong, it's easier to try challenging, but highly rewarding things in your relationships!  You can fly, knowing that, even if you fall, you'll catch yourself.

Enjoy What Becomes

It's been a while since I've posted.

Suffice it to say that I've been living the grand poly lifestyle and ran headlong into a nest of sticky wickets. The long of the short story is that horrible mistakes were made, feelings were hurt, and a lot of hard work is being done by everyone to lick their wounds and right all the wrongs. My heart hasn't been in writing about love. It's been a terribly long month and I'm glad it is over.

Reflecting lately as I have on the lifestyle of Polyamory, the more I'm convinced that it's more a journey of self-discovery - more that than a destination, a label, a title, or an orientation. Polyamory is a process.

It is a process of reinvention, continuously re-examining your beliefs and your assumptions, to arrive at something more genuine and more authentic in your relationships. Along the way, through heartbreak, tears, anger, frustration, and fear, you change. You learn about yourself - your limitations, your inadequacies, your strengths, and your capabilities - that (hopefully) will make you a better partner, lover, friend, wife or husband.

After all, caught in a complex web of relationships between n-number of people, how could we ever assume everything can and will remain static? Polyamory through its nature inherently invites change and ensures that the status quo is invariably short-lived. Poly is an awesome catalyst for self-discovery.

And for me, there's been a lot of work this month on self-discovery. I think I'll leave it at that, but I will say that for a long time I've been intensely focused on outcomes - the final destination - in my own Polyamorous relationships. Yet lately, I'm more likely to focus almost entirely on the now. Living the now, enjoying the now, accepting what the now is and what it can offer. Loving everything about what the now can be.

I recently read that Benjamin Franklin asked himself in the morning, "What good shall I do today?" Okay, so lately my spin on Benny has been, "Today, what good can I do for each of my partners?" What can I do, right now, today, to make the most of each bond in my life, and to accept the joy that each of them brings me, instead of focusing on the end-game. Take it one day at a time. Enjoy what becomes. And it's helping.

R

Finding What We Want

I own four leather-bound journals. They're nice: parchment paper and a ribbon page mark along the spine. I spared no expense. I bought the journals in a tumultuous part of my life with the expectation of writing something in them, and I wanted the presentation to mean something. At the time, I had an urge to write. I think I wanted to apologize.

Look, when I'm dead, someone - somewhere - is going to want an explanation. They're going to want to know who I was, where I lived, how I lived, and why I made the choices that I made. Better yet, they're going to want to know what I stood for. I thought the journals could help.

Everybody in my family tells me that I look a lot like my grandfather. Well, my grandfather died when I was 12 so I barely had a chance to know him. And as an adult, I've had questions: I wanted an explanation - who he was, what choices he made, what he stood for. If I'm so much like him, it stands to reason that knowing my grandfather could be an "Idiot's Guide" to me. Could have been useful. Still, nobody had much of anything. Just memories.

Some choose to live in a space outside of themselves: looking in and watching. Kind of like watching television or the warped reflection of life on the rippling surface of a pond. Journals are like that. Instead of living in the moment, you become the archivist of the past; they give you an opportunity to critical debate what you see. What you have, what you don't have... what you could have; where you went; what potential was wasted in the time you had.

A little journaling is healthy. Insightfulness about yourself might spur corrective action. We can learn from our mistakes, take change seriously and make better choices. Yet, too much could be distracting and risking obsessive behavior: re-writing our past to make it more presentable to the future audience; conveniently repackaging facts; absently forgetting what you've got. It is too easy: instead of the journal reflecting on the goodness of life, the journal runs the risk of lamenting the life you don't lead, or, serving as a fantasy to distract us from the life - the good life - we've got.

The journal keeps us from finding what we want by obscuring what we've already got.

Maybe that's why my grandfather never left me any explanations or apologies. No trace but the ethereal of memory. Maybe he was too busy living the life he had and appreciating it for what it was, and I'm supposed to sort it out on my own.

s1m0n

Does pain=value?

Common wisdom would have us believe that the best things in life are hard to get. There is value placed on pain within our culture. "No pain, no gain!" is flip, but often perceived as truth. In relationships, we see people struggle, fight with themselves and their partners, and push against the predominant culture. Poly can be seen as something that has pain intrinsically tied to the value of growth and having so much love available to it's adherents. The price of playing poker.

Have we really bought into this load of crap? Where is the value in being stuck in a place of pain? To prove we can take it? Is it the idea that the greater rewards that are on the line mean greater sacrifices? That sounds like some seriously flawed programming.

Speaking for myself, healthy, low-drama relationships are infinitely more rewarding than the ones that require huge amounts of emotional effort to "get to the good stuff", or the ones that see conflict as necessary to reach towards growth. I'd rather enjoy an amicable conversation with intimacy building moments, and skip the anxiety-provoking "does this person really care about me?" passive-aggressive crap. I don't want to have Make Up Sex, I want to have I Am Really Into You Sex.

In my real job, I'm a massage therapist. I LOVE working with complex issues and all sort of body types. There is one exception to that. I don't like working on body-builders. I'm not talking about people that are physically fit, I'm referring to the people that are in the gym lifting weights 2-4 hours a day most days of the week.

Why, you ask? Well, here we have people that are pushing past their limits, through the pain, actually damaging their own musculature to achieve a specific aesthetic, a look, a feel. Worse yet, they are addicted to their own endorphins, unable/unwilling to back off and rest injuries. Working with body builders in the past, I've noticed that their muscles, although they appear to be most impressive, are full of scar tissue and damage, inflexible and prone to injury.

In the same way, it has been my experience that people in relationships that are built on pain, extremely intensive in effort, and highly consuming of resources, might be able to produce something that looks pretty good, but underneath the surface, there is so much damage that was involved in the creation of the relationship that the product is flawed from the inside out. It lacks flexibility, and readily falls apart under strain.

The people within these relationships might even be able to recognize that they are participating in something that isn't terribly healthy, but are so addicted to the relationship endorphins produced by that pain, that moving on doesn't feel do-able.

The question that remains is: Do you want your relationships to be easy, flexible, pleasurable entities that help you grow stronger by lifting you up? Or do you buy into the idea that pain=value in your personal life? Being able to do emotional heavy lifting can seem pretty impressive, but it comes at a cost.

Patience and Perspective

Since the beginning of the year, I've had to focus a lot of my spare cycles into work. I've probably taken on too much - work requires my attention almost daily; I'm working somewhere between 70 and 80 and sometimes 90 hours a week. At times, my commitments have taken me away from the home over weeknights and weekends. I'm blessed to have such good friends in PG and PF who help and support my efforts. Meanwhile, I'm also left with a couple of nagging thoughts... Thoughts about patience and polyamory.

Right now, you my be like me. Self-described poly-person with little time and important commitments. You may be otherwise embroiled in a primary relationship that presently requires your full attention. You might also be waiting - waiting to be asked out, waiting for the right girl, waiting for the right moment. You might be interested in poly, curious, but not foolhardy, and waiting before diving in. You may be between partners, exploring monogamy, divorcing, or in the midst of a battle for your health. You're not in multiple, loving relationships. Maybe you're in one, or two, or none at all. You are waiting. And you are struggling with the moment. You may be impatient: where is my time? Where may I find my other partner(s)? When will she arrive? Where is he? When can I move on? When will he understand? When can I turn the page? When can I have what she has? Further, the waiting moment is an agonizing metric - a feeling that time, opportunity, perfection, and happiness are slowly slipping away from you - and that may reinforce feelings of separation, isolation, confusion, and disenfranchisement.

Careful: we are in a rush to nowhere, and in that rush, you may be tempted to diminish yourself. Let it go; this is wrong, and, it's a lie.

Myself, I am learning to accept the moment.

Really, when you can do nothing, what can you do? You can struggle, mope, brood, lash out, and if we do so, it affects nothing and unsettles everything around us; our response is based on an illusion - a fantasy that exists purely in your mind about what you might have, could touch, possibly find, or will experience. We must accept the moment.

We must also appreciate the moment because this moment, right now, provides absolute clarity into who we are, what we like, what we don't, what we want, where we wish to be, how we wish to be. We get the cool opportunity to explore ourselves. Being in this moment is healthy - it qualifies us for the times when we're in relationships and might question, "Is this really what I want?" Being here, in this moment, gives you perspective. You will know the difference.

I have poly friends who seem to be in a rush. They want whatever they want now and are disappointed that they don't have "it" now. Meanwhile, I have poly friends who're in life transitions and are cautious about their first steps. I have met several people who I'd like to chat up and maybe get to know them, and I have poly friends who're dating, having sex, immersed in fun and exciting polyness - it's hard to dismiss that.

I would love to date more, snuggle more, be in secondary and tertiary relationships, and be deeply involved with my polypeeps. Right now, though, I can't.

Zen has a principle: the best of all possible outcomes is happening to you at this very moment; it's an optimistic view that helps shape the perspective that - no matter what your choices or hardships might be - this is the most perfect outcome the universe has prepared for you. If every event is the best outcome (instead of being the "worst" of possible things that could happen to you), you tend to spend time thinking about how fortunate you are instead of how miserable you're becoming.

So, right now, breathe, relax, wait. It's okay to be poly-single; poly-mono; poly-hopeful; poly-cautious; poly-skeptical; even poly-anxious. Learn from it. Say, "Thank you, Universe: I'm gaining perspective... to know what it's like when I'm otherwise preoccupied versus deeply in love, lust, or some serious like! I'm taking advantage of the moment to learn about myself and be better in the next moment."

s1m0n

We are more than the sum of our part(ner)s.

PF-



There's an odd communal consciousness that can develop when living with others. I noticed this with PG fairly early on in our marriage. He'd get a bit freaked out by how deeply into his head I would dip at times. "Where's the....?" "Second shelf behind the peanut butter. No, on the _left_!" "What am I looking for anyways?" "You're looking for the syrup, aren't you?" "Ok, that's just creepy!" Now, I'm starting to notice little bits and pieces of that happening with PG, S and I as well.



It's sort of like the idea that people start to look like their pets, only in an interpersonal way. How does one maintain a sense of individuality when it can be so much easier to just drift into the flow of the group mind? I even find myself using "we" even more frequently than I used to, no royal aspirations intended!



PG has a more well-developed sense of self than I, and so does S. I'm not sure why I have a mushy sense of self, at least within the context of my larger family dynamic. It reminds me of when I was back in jazz band. I very consciously chose to have one of the inner parts, despite having talent enough to take solos and so on. I much preferred being part of the collective to standing out, in spite of being worthy of notice as an individual.

While I am certain that I have more self-confidence and sense of my own worth than I did at 17, is this tendency to blend into my family a vestige of a time when life was not so rosy, and being able to conceal who I was was a useful tool? When unseen, it was easier to have freedom of movement.

Now I lead a fairly public life. Others know quite a bit about me, about us. Oddly, when we started this blog up, it was fairly balanced in participation. Now I am the main contributor. Part of me is wondering how I ended up here, largely on my own, exposing my inner self to others? Part of me is sure that this is exactly where I need to be right now, sharing about my family, but also working through things that are all about me, learning that I am indeed more than the sum of my partners.