Float Trips

Float trips are always over before they begin.

As soon as I'm putting the canoe in the water, I'm already getting out at the end of the ride. I'm in the rattling school bus, wet and sunburned and dehydrated, listening to the retired schoolteacher driving it chatter on about Rachel Ray or how she's just discovered garlic or whatever. I'm on every other float trip I've ever been on since I've been three, and, for some reason, I'm never sitting in the canoe.

Ever.

One float trip, a year and half ago with Jay I was actually "on." We floated the Eleven Point in the Ozarks and it was the most beautiful trip I've ever been on. Of course that was when I still loved and trusted him. Now, I still love him, but I don't trust him, and it really came home to me sitting in the canoe with him for 2 days that something essential has been lost, at least temporarily.

This is just awful. How do we get back from this?

Stephen Maturin, one of my favorite characters in literature (Master and Commander, etc.) reflects--and I'm paraphrasing--that the worst thing that can happen to a couple is for one person to become morally superior to the other. And that's true! Moral one-upmanship is death to romance. And we've got it big time. I have been WRONGED and we both know it. Every comment echoes back to it. Our big fight three weeks ago (his tirade, actually) looms between us, in the things I say and the things I don't say, and 48 hours in a canoe gives you a lot of time to think.

It was occasionally fun, but it was never really light. I kept trying to push my thoughts away, to focus on the moment, the water and the beauty and fill us up with that. I think I was successful in this about 60% of the time. My thoughts would start chewing up our RELATIONSHIP and then I would breathe and think "canoe, blue water, duck, heron, cold, paddle" and get filled with the present. He was trying, too, and we were okay when we were touching. We are always okay when we are touching. But he's awfully worried about stuff. He just doesn't know what to do. And the stuff he's worrying about is huge. Big life foundation stuff.

He told me, "I found this notebook a few days ago when I was cleaning out the office--I had copied down this Rumi poem in it years before--I just loved poem--it was about how someone steals into his tent and carries his troubles away with him--and I realized it was about you. Do you think you can know about someone before they come into your life?"

Yeah, I kind of do. I think maybe the idea of time being linear is a mistake and maybe it kind of all happens at once, but our organizing perception is linear. The float trip's already over. The vase is already broken.

This is why right speech is so important. It's not that the lies you tell are so bad, it's that you have to think about them all the time, and that keeps you from being direct and present with the person you're with. And then you miss that person. You lose them entirely, because you're in your own head worrying about spinning your own fiction so you don't get caught. It's my fault, too. I didn't tell Jay about having breakfast with Abercrombie. I did it to get a bit of my own back. I have zero interest in Abercrombie and I would never cheat on Jay. But then, when I told Jay the funny story about getting locked out of the house, I had to invent a reason why I was out that early in the morning, and then I had to remember it. And that takes so much fucking energy. And then I felt bad, and I felt I was giving the entire situation too much weight.
And then I was mad at Jay for feeling like I had to do this in the first place. And then I understood why he was so angry at me. You can say, well, that isn't very healthy! But who's healthy? Are you healthy? Does that mean you don't get to be loved?

This translates to what goes on when you sit. On a larger scale, your ego is a lie. Your story is a lie. You don't know the truth, you don't know your place in it. So you create one--pure spun fiction. I did this, I like this, lalala, All an independent creation. Don't be mad at yourself, everyone does it. But remembering it gets in the way of being, doesn't it? Your float trip is over, before it begins.


That's my 1/2 hour.