Day 87
compromise
It is not living with my mistakes that is proving so hard, it’s living with my compromises. Mistakes are the objects of preterit verbs. They happened, definitively in the past, are done. We can only examine them from the present, and while we may suffer the consequences, we can yet remove ourselves from the mistakes and move forward.
Compromise on the other hand, is a choice to live into something that continues through the present and into the future. It is a choice to continue to accept, engage and work with something that you are not naturally in alignment with. Very literally, my choice to work at a computer for many years, which has paid me well, was a physical compromise for which I experience ongoing back, shoulder, neck, arm and wrist pain. My acceptance that this was the best way to support my family, my engagement with the system that rewards this acceptance, is a deep compromise.
Where I feel most compromise in my life is in my relationships and in human society. I feel that I have compromised my deepest sense of what life could be, and who we are, in service to the status quo. I even feel that in my most intimate relationships, I have compromised the idea that love can be manifested in such a way that it transforms us. Instead of working to manifest this love, I consciously work in service to ideas about sex and marriage and friendship that serve to maintain a way of life that makes us comfortable, rather than deepens our sense of love.
Living with these compromises has created a spiritual, emotional, mental and even physical tension in my life that is sometimes nearly unbearable. I long to be passionately and deeply connected to a friend or lover, but this can be so demanding and uncomfortable, so I subjugate my desires to a kind of love that allows the other person, and often myself, to remain comfortable, that asks very little of them. This is a deep and abiding compromise that taints our pleasure and stifles our growth. I can sometimes feel the relationships going sour, but feel paralyzed by my continued compromise.
On a greater scale, I have compromised in the ways that I engage the neglects and injustices that we collectively perform against each other and this planet, by accepting it as inevitable, as intrinsic. To not compromise here would be to truly ask myself how my way of engaging the community I live in perpetuates injustice and neglect; how my material needs are met by my complicity in a system of takers and those who are left with not-enough or nothing at all. I would work against a religion that has never learned to balance the preservation of tradition (preserved for the sake of those who seek the security and identity that tradition offers,) with the ever reaching, dynamic energy of Divine Love and Creativity, which seeks to continually bring us deeper into a life where we become accustomed to change, growth and epiphany.
I have made plenty of mistakes; they are like tears in a tapestry where the threads are exposed. But, the compromises I have made, or have inherited, are woven in; they are so deeply embedded that sometimes I think they must serve some purpose. My soul tells me another story though. It begs me to unravel whatever must be undone, and then to weave a wider, richer, warmer tapestry that tells the whole story.
