When I was young and in grammar school and something of a voracious reader, I often selected my next readings from lists of award-winning books for young adults. I remember selecting a book called “Up a Road Slowly” at one time and being excited, as I carried it home from the library, to read it.

For me, at that time, it was a flop. It seemed slow and ponderous and frustrating in the way that everything in the story was somehow about the benefits of slowness, of patience, of growth over time.

I wasn’t at all ready for it then. I can’t imagine that many young people are, actually. I can picture an awards committee full of aging adults being quite taken by the story and seeing it as something that was quite beautiful in their eyes and that young people “ought to read.”

— § —

I think that even throughout my adult years, I wasn’t quite ready for this story, or for this concept. The book has long held a place in my imagination as that very same flop, an example of what a story probably shouldn’t be, a case of a book with didactic intentions that forgot what an audience was.

It is only now, pushing forty, that I have recalled the story and writing again for the first time in rather a long time, and suddenly, with new eyes. Suddenly, it seems quite lovely to me.

It is a season of life in which I am, suddenly, happy to be going up a road slowly. Suddenly, it doesn’t just resonate, but it seems in fact to honor things that are good in gentle ways.

— § —

Tonight for the first time in some time, I remember that spring exists, that summer exists, that fall exists, that there are seedlings and breezes and rainstorms and warm early mornings to come again—that winter is not eternal, that time does, indeed pass, and that there are other things than present circumstances to come.

It is precisely because present circumstances are good that I can do this, and doing this makes present circumstances seem all the better.

There is a paradoxical way in which “living in the present” opens up the rest of time to be embraced, and in which embracing the rest of time as it is, with a clear head and without any particular striving enables one to live in the present.

It is a different flavor of awareness, and it is good.

— § —

Tonight life is good.

It’s hard to know when you’re grown up, or how to be grown up, when you didn’t get much of a chance to be a kid.

— § —

The end of childhood can arrive early in all kinds of disguises, worn by parents:

– Violence
– Ambition
– Concern for the future
– Need and loneliness
– Inadequacy

I’m sure there are others.

— § —

For those that don’t know, here’s what kids do:

– Play to exhaustion
– Shirk responsibility
– Lie compulsively
– Yell and make loud noises
– Manipulate and cajole
– Throw tantrums
– Need endlessly
– Ridiculous shit
– Silly shit
– Ignore the future entirely

If you have a kid that isn’t doing this stuff at five, or seven, or even ten years old in some way or other, don’t be too proud of yourself. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve succeeded.

It may mean precisely that you’ve failed. Ask yourself whether—because they didn’t feel safe and loved and accepted doing these things with you during their formative years—they’ll spend the rest of their lives compulsively doing them with other adults instead.

— § —

And if you are an adult that recognizes yourself in that last sentence, you should probably also—for your own health and happiness—ask you just what it is about your childrens’ childhood that you have such trouble tolerating. And why.

As parents, we both came to the table unwittingly trying right wrongs—through our children—that were done to us in the past. Both for their sakes, and for hours. Not entirely healthy.

And the complicating factor was that the wrongs done to us were in some ways opposite. And, as a result, so were our overcompensations.

This tended to serve to reinscribe those wrongs, as though we had done them once again, to each other.

— § —

A post ago I went on for a bit about the advantages of being an introvert.

Now one of the disadvantages.

In our close relationships, we are not very compartmentalized. People that are close to us tend to have full access if we can give it. This is not like extroverts, who tend to have a wide variety of access levels and manage them effortlessly.

The result is that for those closest to us, the veneer of the “professional adult” is often thin or nonexistent. This can lead to the false sense that we, as their introvert friends, are somehow inadequate, unable to cope, or less mature than everybody else.

They don’t see us functioning as “professional adults” in our lives apart from them, and we tend not to engage them on the level of the “professional adult” when we interact with our close people, because they are our close people.

This can wreak a certain amount of havoc in relationships as those closest to us can slide into that assumption that I mentioned, particularly if they are extroverts, that we are in need of rescue. Because they rarely get a chance to see the “suit and tie” us; instead, they always tend to see the “pajamas” us, and can begin to assume that we’re stuck wandering the world undressed, half asleep, and needing a snuggle.

Just as I think we’re emerging from the storm, we’re back in the storm.

How will I ever know when things are actually what they seem, finally?

Will I ever be able to trust it?

This has been the nature of the carousel for a long, long time. Nothing is solid, no matter how solid it seems. It can’t be allowed to be.

And why do I continue to go where I go emotionally? It’s harder to feel so destabilized if you can keep yourself from being tempted into feeling stabilized in the first place.