“Growth” is a funny word, perhaps only because we toss it around lightly as though it has substance unto itself as a term. Which it doesn’t. When one mentions “growth,” one must also mention a type of growth — physical, emotional, and mental being the most popular. But even then — even when you add the requisite type of growth to your reference — it adds little to your listener or reader’s concrete understanding of what the hell you’re talking about.
So I would say that I’ve grown, in the last month here, but if I didn’t explain what I mean I would be doing a great disservice to the few of you who read this and actually care.
I’ve come to believe that sometimes, the best way to understand people is to remove yourself from them. Which is, incidentally, what I’ve done here. I see MCAT girl occasionally, and I see some of the other people I know here once every three days or so, but it’s a couple of hours at most. The rest of the time I’m left with myself, and that, my friends, is a frightening thing. I don’t know a lot of people who spend considerable chunks of time alone, who carve out pieces of the day because they love themselves enough to say “no, actually I can’t go to dinner tonight, I’m going to be [insert reading, bubble bath, painting nails, writing in journal, meditating, etc.] – by myself.” And I wasn’t sure I wanted to be anything like the few people I know who do say that.
But I plan to. Because at the end of the day, I like myself more than I like most of the people who surround me — and I doubt I’m alone when I say that [har. pun]. The scary part, right now — the part that’s making me uncomfortable when I sit at work for seven hours a day, and take the bus and the metro, and walk to the gym, and make dinner and eat it alone — is fighting all of the thoughts that I’ve kept simmering just below the surface of my conscious mind for the last six months. Allowing myself to think without reigning in my thoughts, without suffocating them all with constant activity, is simultaneously liberating and horrifying, depressing and uplifting. But imagine! Imagine going through life and being okay wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, because you’re so comfortable with yourself. Never feeling lonely, never allowing external influences to leave you bereft, never allowing anything to destroy your sense of worth.
I’m being friendly to my thoughts. I’m letting them come and go as they please, and I’m greeting them when they enter and sending them off with little gifts when they leave. I’m dealing with all of the injustices and the hurts and the ugly, ugly feelings, and smiling and saying “Hello, friends! I’ll give you all a chance to voice your opinions, just as long as you promise not to rip my soul in half. Great. Thanks.”
Learning to live with myself, by myself, has been growth. The whole thing reminds me suspiciously of Thoreau’s experience at Walden Woods, save for the small issue of my inability to produce philosophy of that caliber. But I suppose I am trying to “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
When I came to Montreal I had huge expectations — of partying, and meeting people, and lying in bed exhausted each night from the fun and adventure of it all. But I’ve found that things are no less adventurous when they’re calm, and that living isn’t necessarily measured in the accumulation of major experiences. It sounds terribly trite, here on paper: kind of a pathetic summary of my findings so far. That’s okay. There’s more that I haven’t quite placed yet.
I’ve managed to come up with several resolutions for the fall, and I’m looking forward to testing them out once things get under way.
On a less introspective note, yesterday I went to Schwartz’s for an early dinner. Schwartz’s is incredibly famous and actually has a money exchange counter inside it because so many Americans cross the border just to eat here. Which isn’t surprising, given the American affinity for meat. Because that’s what Schwartz’s is — a tiny smoked meat place, a “Montreal Hebrew delicatessen” with the best meat I’ve tasted in a long time. And I’m not even very fond of meat.
So I highly recommend it, if you’re ever up here. A hole-in-the-wall, but everyone knows where it is, and the line of people waiting falls out the door and against the neighboring stores.
1 Comment
8 July 2008 at 10:03 pm
1) Why is “Why We Have Affairs – And Why Not to Tell” a related post?
2) Well freaking said, Sara Haji. Good for you for having the guts to explore yourself by yourself.
I am so so so excited for you.