I'm slipping into becoming That Guy. Not the version of "That Guy" who makes the rock and roll faux pas of wearing a concert t-shirt from the last tour of a band to a show on the current tour of the same band. Please. Even my socially stunted self knows better than that.... But rather I'm drifting toward being That Guy who lets the blog slide by for weeks at a time. I have a handful of blogs that I follow, and it always irritates me when I have to wait for an update to come through. And that seems to be me right now.
I was looking over my Facebook profile today, mostly because I only have two more days of lesson plans to prepare for the short week before winter break, and my spiraling absence of motivation usually winds up leading me to Facebook at some point; and let's face it, Facebook more or less wouldn't exist without a spiraling absence of motivation from its users. (Not to mention -- Bejeweled Blitz daily spin today? 1,000,000 coins!!! Hello!!) ANYWAY, I was reading through my info since I recently gave in and took on the new "60 Minutes"-heralded profile layout and felt vaguely concerned about the overall impression all of those likes and favorites and such would give. I got to the quote section and read one that feels particularly appropriate today:
"If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies... we draw our lines around these moments of pain and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us."
This came from the book "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman. I don't remember the context, but I remember being struck by the quote enough that it stuck in my head for well over a year, until time degraded the accuracy of my memory and I had to scan through all 600-odd pages of a book that was only okay just to find it again. I took this to mean that regardless of how much people can mean to each other, we ultimately have to isolate ourselves from most of the other people in our lives to a degree. We have to maintain a certain level of distance to preserve our own well-being, because if we didn't we'd be overwhelmed by worry and concern and sadness while we looked on at all of the bad things that can happen to each other.
The reason this resonated with me today was because I can think of a few people in my daily life who have different degrees of crap going on right now, and there's really nothing I can do to make these things better for them other than be supportive. This isn't always good because usually I'm someone who, when faced with a problem, wants to take action to make it go away RIGHT NOW. When I can't, I feel pretty helpless. Which comes back to being an island -- you have to acknowledge you can't help, and you have to keep your own life moving forward and enjoy it as much as you can. I've got my own problems to deal with, but in the grand scheme of things, as much gravity as those problems might have for me, most of them are nothing compared to what other people have to deal with. Trying to stay on that island helps me keep that perspective, and, hopefully, keeps me happy enough so I'm able to offer support to people who need it more than I do, and enables me to deal with my own problems more successfully.
Wow. Where the hell did all of that come from? Not exactly what I was planning on writing about today. Maybe I should cut myself off here before I veer away from contemplative and start coming across as a bigger know-it-all than usual....
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