Love and continuity

Now that TechReady (an internal Microsoft training week) is over, I'm spending the weekend in Seattle, effectively by myself. I decided to attend a class here next week so I'm sticking around until then. The class will be extremely valuable to my career, will enable me to provide an important service to one of my clients, and fits exactly with my vision for the world (one in which technology eliminates crime and terrorism).

I had intended to spend the weekend helping at a BYB function with my friend Sheryl in Indianapolis. There were a couple of draws to helping there. BYB was an intense experience, and Sheryl shared in my experience. As a volunteer I was looking forward to sharing something new with her and mooching off of the experiences of the group attending the event. I was hoping this would give Sheryl and me a new experience to draw from, and potentially change the way we've been behaving towards each other lately.

My choice about this weekend got me thinking about the choices I have had to make between my past or present, and my future.

Sometimes I have to decide between experiences that build continuity with people I know, and new experiences. More often than not, I choose new experiences.

Many would describe moving forward confidently into an unknown situation as courageous. In my case, however, maybe this is the status quo. It doesn't scare me to change. What is a stretch for me, and what might require my courage, is doing things that strengthen, improve, and sometimes repair, my existing relationships and situations. I recognized this in my own BYB experience. I had decided to focus on connection, and after working on it some, realized that I'm not terrible at upping my connection numbers; it's depth of connection that I have struggled to maintain.

I have had plenty of experiences. I've traveled, trained, worked, walked, run and partied in various parts of the world. I've shared these experiences with many different people, and I think there's power in that. I've created connection with people, and shared myself with them. Many of them have become my friends. I've affected most of their lives in some small but powerful way, and I appreciate that I have the power to do that. They've all helped shape who I am and who I will be.

I know that my disjointed life, one in which I'm bouncing around and refusing to accept comfort, makes it more difficult to share many experiences with the same people. I make the choice to live this way, and will continue to do so. This ability to push into unknown territory to pursue lofty goals and visions is my biggest strength. But it conflicts with my want to create deep connections, and precludes me from remembering and learning from my past experiences.

To put it dryly, in Army terms, love and continuity are a force multiplier; they enable people to be more effective.

I've always expected that among my deep, loving relationships, I'll find someone who will share my commitment and longing for continuity. We'd offer continuous insight into each other's lives based on our shared history of stories and frequent shared experiences.

My mother has been my most important source of this continuity, and I appreciate that she provides this for me. Sharing with her is like a mirror for me that I can use to check the sanity of my decisions and recognize unintended consequences for my actions. Our conversations also give me often-needed perspective. There are, of course, facets of my life that I won't share with my mother and she's not always available. So there are gaps in the transparency of my life (as is probably the case for everyone), and my experiences get shared across disjoint groups and lead to the situation where I feel nobody really knows me, and I forget a lot of what I've been through.

It's a self-promotion problem more than anything, I suspect. I'm the one who knows me best, so the continuity comes from my ability to share with others.

It takes a long time and a lot of love to build mutual understanding of who we are and how we live our lives, so I've expected for a while now that I would have one "most important" relationship in my life, someone who I love and who loves me, and who wants to commit to sharing the majority of each other's experiences, stories and ideas. And I've always suspected this type of intimacy would be associated with romance. For whatever reasons, it's been hard for me to separate the two; maybe they're intertwined as part of a biological or divine plan for the advancement of humanity.