Day 70 "In the trenches" (remediation edition)

Some days you eat the b'ar, some days the b'ar eats you (and picks his teeth with your bones). Some days you hit the right notes with the right people at the right time--that is, sometimes you pay attention--and sometimes you're sleepwalking through your day, and you crash through unintended and disharmonious results to your actions. Some days you get good news that reinforces your (obviously fragile, because otherwise why would news, good or bad, make a difference?) sense of self-worth; other days, you get hit with disappointment that rattles that same (shaky) sense of self-worth.

Some days contain both.

One thing I've learned over a very long time--too long a time--is that withstanding disappointment is a multi-stage process just as is withstanding grief. 'Most everybody in the post-'70s therapy-conscious understands that the death of a loved one, or a relationship, or of a hope, involves a process of grieving, first and most eloquently (and humanely) described by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross: Denial-Anger-Bargaining-Depression-Acceptance: possibly the most powerful depiction of which is her own photo-journal/essay To Live Until We Say Goodbye. Ross's breakthrough insight--at least as significant in the 20th century, I believe, as Freud's identification of the past traumas which cause present neurosis--is to recognize that any loss will implicate these stages of grief, and (again like Freud) that the only lastingly-healthy way to reintegrate and survive emotionally intact is to recognize, identify, and move through all these stages. To avoid the stages of grief--as when avoiding the inevitability of death--is to prolong or even freeze oneself within them.

Thus also with certain kinds of life-disappointment. If you've cherished certain hopes, dreams, or scenarios, then there's a certain grief-cycle that has to happen when those scenarios disappear...

....and it's almost one AM and I've got to crash. More tomorrow

Below the jump: first, the portable Office, with a new appurtenance: Blackberry World Edition (I know--I've seen the pictures of that subhuman sociopath Karl Rove with his Blackberry, and I don't like knowing we have even that little in common--but I have an excuse). I've learned to work pretty well in diverse environments, to use the laptop as a mobile office space, and to be able to focus and be productive. But the Crackberry--one of each of whose functions I'm trying to learn daily (and of course failing: it's much smarter than I am)--works in China, or so they claim.

And we're goin'.