Xtra News Community 2
March 29, 2024, 08:51:21 pm
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Welcome to Xtra News Community 2 — please also join our XNC2-BACKUP-GROUP.
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links BITEBACK! XNC2-BACKUP-GROUP Staff List Login Register  

Mark Morford — Notes & Errata

Pages: 1 ... 7 8 9 10 11 [12]   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: Mark Morford — Notes & Errata  (Read 24478 times)
0 Members and 3 Guests are viewing this topic.
Kiwithrottlejockey
Admin Staff
XNC2 GOD
*
Posts: 32232


Having fun in the hills!


« Reply #275 on: March 19, 2014, 05:29:26 pm »


Mark Morford

How to sucker a billion Christians

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Tuesday, March 04, 2014

YOU DO NOT mess with blind faith.

Just a humble reminder. You do not question the dully codified stories of Christianity, or challenge them, or offer even remotely refreshing, alternative storylines with anything resembling intelligence, or humor, or deep intellectual curiosity.

What are you, a masochist? To do so would imply there is something to be gained, some sort of cultural progress to be made in the realms of the exhausted — but still deeply paranoid and very simpleminded — Christian faith, when there most certainly is not. Besides, you want to make lots of money, right? Of course you do.

Do you know who understands this overarching rule perfectly? Mark Burnett, the goliath TV producer who single-handedly destroyed the modern world by popularizing reality TV. Burnett and his wife, “Touched by an Angel” actress Roma Downey, know exactly how sucker-able are the vast majority of the world’s Christians. Because they’re evil that way. Smart. I mean smart.

So smart are the Burnetts that they recently hacked together a terrifically lousy movie about the life and times of Jesus, called Son of God. They made it by cobbling new footage with bits of last year’s 10-hour History Channel miniseries on the Bible that was already quite perfectly lousy but still really popular because, you know, Jesus.

But of course, they didn’t stop there. The Burnetts recently travelled the country, shilling this new hunk of spiritual Valium to pastors, churches and shopping malls in hopes of pre-selling millions of tickets, safe in the the knowledge that devout Christians will see just about anything that reassures (but never, ever challenges or advances) their faith, no matter how poorly made, intellectually insulting or terminally boring it might be.


Sexy. Hunky. European. Heavily sedated. Nice hair. Bland as dishwater. Praise!
Sexy. Hunky. European. Heavily sedated. Nice hair. Bland as dishwater. Praise!

Are they right? Of course they’re right. There is tremendous money to be made endlessly reinforcing what the masses have already been told to believe, in keeping millions addicted to the very same drug they’ve been taking for millennia (hi, Fox News). Conversely, there is less money to be made — though much more fun to be had — sparking religious controversy, or at least trying to create something, you know, incisive, spiritually messy, or artistically interesting.

Here’s a fun factoid: Back in 1988, I worked as a lowly intern for a small record label that had its offices in the Universal Pictures building in Burbank, the very same year the The Last Temptation of Christ came out. Oh, what a time it was.

Controversy! Melodrama! I remember looking out the smoked-glass windows of the label’s office one fine morning and seeing a very long, poorly dressed line of angry-looking Christians marching uniformly toward the building, holding signs and yelling slogans, protesting the film’s “radical,” “blasphemous” portrayal of Jesus. It was all sort of adorable.

Do you remember what Jesus’ “last temptation” actually was? To be a normal guy. Wife, kids, a glass of wine before bed, mortality. This was the great, “sacrilegious” controversy: that Jesus might have been a little bit troubled, a little bit scared, a little bit human about accepting his divine fate. Being the messiah, after all, is a bitch.

But here’s the best part: The movie hadn’t even been released yet. Not a single protester had actually seen the film (much less read the original Nikos Kazantzakis novel). None of them had any real idea what the film actually depicted, or that it ended on a perhaps even more genuinely spiritual note than the same childish, Sunday school narrative they already knew.

Did it matter? Of course not. They’d been told — by a callow priest, an angry radio host, a terrified grandma — that the movie was heresy, that a tiny aspect of their faith was being lightly prodded by a popular entertainment. They were told to be outraged. Because if there’s one thing that threatens God’s all-encompassing love, compassion and eternal omnipotence, it’s an ’80s Scorsese flick.

The church, of course, has been doing this same dance for millennia — rallying their sheep to protect their own version of religious history, the very history they themselves made up/swiped from pagan sources, rewrote, rewrote again (and again and again) and then forced down the world’s throat for 2,000 years. Great scam.

Fast forward to 2004. It was exactly 10 years ago that the nation endured “The Passion of the Christ”, Mel Gibson’s sadomasochistic splatter-fest, a film so grotesque, so ultra-violent and cruel, it was like a master class in how to shred human flesh with a whip.

But oh, how the believers flocked! By the millions, over and over again, all at the behest/command of their pastors, fundamentalist radio hosts and their Rick Warrens. Entire Christian families packed the country’s theaters for weeks and even months, stone-faced and miserable — many bringing along their young children — as Romans beat poor James Caviezel’s Jesus into bloody veal for two hours straight. The more devout believed they were seeing actual history, when all they were seeing was one man’s violently distorted horror fantasia. It was ugly.

The good news is, Son of God offers no such melodrama, on either end of the spectrum. It takes the exact opposite tack, going straight for saccharine blandness, depicted Jesus as a hunky, cream-filled, Euro-looking white boy completely lacking in mystical intrigue, Hallmark-ready and devoid of anything resembling true spirit. Or brain. Or heart. Or spark. Bring the kids!


Whoops, how did this ancient spiritual figure that precedes Christianity by many thousands of years and which represents no dogma or churchly power-grab get in here? Sorry.
Whoops, how did this ancient spiritual figure that precedes Christianity by many thousands of years and which represents no dogma
or churchly power-grab get in here? Sorry.


As irreverent Episcopal deacon David Henson pointed out in his hilarious live-tweeting of the movie: there’s no heresy here. But there is some weird racism. White supremacy. White people everywhere, in fact. Also, Jesus not really giving a damn about the poor or the oppressed. Is Jesus perpetually on Xanax? Sure looks like it. Is everyone speaking in a British accent? Apparently.

Son of God offers, in short, every bit of clunky spiritual pabulum the church has endorsed out for centuries (full disclosure: I watched exactly 58 minutes of the History Channel miniseries, more than enough to glean the suffocating blandness. I’m quit sure the movie offers little else).

Is there any other way? Sure. You may, if you are so inclined, create something that subverts religious dogma, by either exploding it with wild, Monty Python-grade satire or smartly undermining it with fantastical literary genius (ref: Kazantzakis, or even something like Philip Pullman’s brilliant His Dark Materials). Of course, doing so will only please those who already get it, who are educated and therefore capable of complex, nuanced, abstract critical thinking. In other words, exactly not the millions of literalist faithful one might hope to entice to begin to think for themselves.

So here we are, 2014, and to the church’s delight, the song remains ever the same. We have another big-budget, terminally weak Jesus rehashing, featuring the same stultifying ideas, the same stale Sunday school mythologies originally (re)written by some very old, very repressed men who lived so long ago they might as well be aliens, men whose job it was to destroy/refashion ancient pagan belief systems to suit the church and fortify its power for centuries.

Kudos, then, to Mark Burnett for buttressing their musty cause, for inspiring not a single new possibility or tantalizing spiritual idea, for merely pouring another bucket of lukewarm water into what’s already a very tepid ocean. The church should be pleased.

Jesus, not so much.


Email: Mark Morford

Mark Morford on Twitter and Facebook.

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2014/03/04/how-to-sucker-a-billion-christians
Report Spam   Logged

If you aren't living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space! 
Kiwithrottlejockey
Admin Staff
XNC2 GOD
*
Posts: 32232


Having fun in the hills!


« Reply #276 on: March 19, 2014, 05:29:38 pm »


Mark Morford

Your hot selfie reveals all

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Tuesday, March 11, 2014

WHAT'S your default? What’s your favorite go-to expression? Don’t be coy; you know you have one.

Sweet smirk? Goofy grin? Smoochy duck-face? Maybe you’re more of a bored hipster sneer, a coy Mona Lisa or a sultry come-hither, like you just had sex with a giant chocolate Jesus and someone took God’s name in sweet, sticky vain. I like that one, too.


This is how. And why.
This is how. And why.

Wait, let me be more specific: What’s your default selfie expression, the specific look you toss off when you hold your smartphone out at arm’s length and click a self pic, adding your favorite little preen, maybe a head tilt, a little whatchoo-lookin’-at sex bomb, and then post it to InstaFaceGramChat. Got one of those? Of course you do.

Selfies! The thing to do. The place to be. 2013’s Word of the Year, after all, which means they’re not just for self-obsessed Millennials named Dylan and Mylie and Katniss. The pope does it, big-name celebs do it, models and porn stars and politicians, too. It’s now the Internet of Everything: posting a selfie is the new cogito ergo sum.


So cute. So empowering.
So cute. So empowering.

It’s true. Unless you’re over 60 or under a rock, odds are fantastically good that you’ve already shot a selfie or ten, maybe a thousand, maybe enough to have one of your smoochy duck-faces counted among the over 650,000 selfies that the kids over at SelfieCity recently gathered from a half-dozen countries, culling them down to a few thousand ideal examples before running them all through a facial analysis measuring software algorithm thing.

And why? Because it’s 2014, silly. This is what we do now. This is what we deem important. Because life is nothing if not futile, ridiculous and wonderful, all at once. Haven’t you heard?

Gauged by their selfies, Russians seem pretty miserable. Brazilians and Thais, on the other hand, seem pretty happy, smiling a lot and not taking it all so damn seriously.


What’s next, female priests? Condoms?
What’s next, female priests? Condoms?

Also: women take more selfies than men, and they like to pose more dramatically when they do it. Overall, humans take fewer selfies than you might have been led to believe. Except for young people, who take them all. The damn. Time.

Fascinating! Sort of! But does any of it matter? Do your selfies actually reveal anything worthwhile about you, anything emotionally or psychologically interesting? Sure they do. Maybe. Why not?

It can be quite a curious practice, after all, to examine your own habits, your own persona, your go-to presentation of self. But even more importantly, it’s revealing to delve into why — what, exactly, is driving that leer or grin or smooch? What desires and fears, doubts and longings go into the faces you show the world? Has it changed over time? Do you smile more or less than you used to? Are you angrier? More shy? Scared? Whiny? Doomed?

In other words, while it’s true that selfies can seem entirely vain and absurd, we’re also in an era that fetishizes rabid individuality and demands everyone be their own micro-brand. A selfie can reveal more than just your ego’s twee posturing — they can speak to the tone and timbre of a nation’s attitudes, gender stereotypes and afflictions. They’re another piece of the grand human puzzle that will never be complete, because it’s not really a puzzle at all and more of a swirling kaleidoscope made of love and blood and whisky and death. I mean, obviously.

The popularity of selfies might also be related to another tragic condition I’ve read about recently, an absolutely terrible disorder suffered largely by otherwise completely innocent, unsuspecting women.

Have you heard of it? It is called RBF — Resting Bitch Face (or Bitchy Resting Face, depending).


RBF. So tragic. (via CollegeHumor)
RBF. So tragic. (via CollegeHumor)

Exactly what it sounds like, really: RBF is when your relaxed, unpremeditated, I’m-just-sitting-here-reading-a-magazine expression just so happens to looks exactly like how someone looks when they want to disembowel a large ham with a chainsaw. Or they just smelled something really bad. Or they just got stabbed in the kidney by an angry elf.

“What’s wrong?” “Are you OK?” “Did you just get stabbed in the kidney?” These are questions RBF sufferers regularly endure, given their endlessly sour-looking expressions. Of course, most often, nothing is wrong. Most often, they have no idea they look that way, until someone tells them. Poor things.

The question, then, is the same for RBF sufferers and selfie addicts alike: How did that face get there? What forces, events and attitudes conspired to slowly, inexorably turn your face into a sexy love doll, a soft beacon of light or a nasty rictus of “meh”? More importantly, what can be done about it?


There’s never a bad time for a hot selfie.
There’s never a bad time for a hot selfie.

(By the way: Plenty of men suffer an equivalent of RBF, hereby defined as RJF — Resting Jerk Face. It’s a lazy, flaccid sneer or perhaps a macho, shameless leer, completely unbecoming of real men. Problem is, RJF is still more expected of the male of the species, and therefore more accepted, at least among the desperate and the lost. Just look at the GOP).

Recently, a depressed RBF sufferer wrote in to a advice columnist asking what to do about her sour countenance. The suggestion: Go to a mirror. Start practicing. Work on your facial muscles, lighten up the eyes, unfurrow the brow, create some new habits. After all, the face is just like any other set of muscles — it can be retrained, relaxed, made wiser, softer, more revealing of joy and intelligence and light.

Good advice. But it also misses the profounder point, no? Isn’t the default expression you give most frequently really a manifestation of your innermost being, your true nature? Or rather, shouldn’t it be?

And if your expression appears endlessly dour and angry, or if it’s dictated solely by desperate ego preening or a need for a million Instagram likes, isn’t it perhaps time to do some deeper work? Re-train the spiritual muscles, perhaps? After all, it’s one thing to just throw some fresh paint on that decrepit shack and pretend you’re bright and happy and full of love. Quite another to strip it to the studs and rebuild the foundation in a whole new, incandescent way.

Put it this way: The calmest, most grounded, awake beings I know — in life, in selfies, in resting expression, whatever — are the ones most connected to spirit, more free of the ego’s death grip, more deeply and happily at home in their skin. They are most definitely not walking around looking as though the very air was attacking them like a swarm of locusts.

So maybe forget about the face. Forget about mere expressions of self. Maybe we can go a little deeper, and little more authentic, more honest, and therefore more obvious and effortless. Call it Resting Luminous Self. Works beautifully for all occasions, no guile or preen, awkward posture or nervous smirk required. Shall we try it?


Email: Mark Morford

Mark Morford on Twitter and Facebook.

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2014/03/11/your-hot-selfie-reveals-all
Report Spam   Logged

If you aren't living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space! 
Kiwithrottlejockey
Admin Staff
XNC2 GOD
*
Posts: 32232


Having fun in the hills!


« Reply #277 on: March 19, 2014, 05:30:01 pm »


Mark Morford

Is “work-life balance” a lie?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 12:55PM - Tuesday, March 18, 2014

DISTINCTIONS! Categories! Don’t we love them so? It’s like a collective fetish, a feral addiction of the species: divisions, boxes, discrete modes of being; this belongs here and that over there, you do this and I do that, I like this and I hate that and it all make perfect sense.

Except that it’s total nonsense. Devil’s work. Insane.

Here’s a tasty one: We have now fully embraced the heartbreaking notion that “life” and “work” are not the same thing — and what’s worse, probably aren’t supposed to be.

In fact, life and work are, for millions, very much at odds with each other, perhaps even enemies, each draining the other’s vital energy, a perpetual tug-of-war for your attention and your soul and how much time you spend with the kids.

Just the way it is, right? Life is what happens after work. Work is what happens when you heave yourself out of bed to go make some money to pay for your life.


Why do you work so hard? Why do you think work isn’t life? And vice-versa?
Why do you work so hard? Why do you think work isn’t life?
And vice-versa?


If you’re at work, you’re obviously not really living. If you’re really living, it sure as hell better not feel like work.

And worst of all: You can’t have both. If you want lots of business success, you sacrifice life, health, family time, soul. If you want to enjoy life in deep and meaningful ways, you’d better not spend all day at work.

Isn’t this a little a little bit weird? Dangerous, even? Hacking and bifurcating, delimiting your brief time here? By this calculus, only something like 67 percent of your life is actually, you know, life. The rest is some form of waiting.

Wait, it gets weirder: Despite the bifurcation, we also accept that life and work are both sort of essential. So it’s now trendy to talk about “work-life balance,” as if such a thing exists, as if just the right amount of each would lead you straight to the mythical land of “happiness,” as if we’re not making this stuff up on the fly.

Don’t just take it from me. Just ask any Millennial: work-life balance is a very big deal indeed. No one under 35 expects to work nearly as hard as their parents; most believe work is equally important as family, or love, or travel, or spending quality time with your video games or your Instagram feeds or wishing you hadn’t wasted $30K on art school.

Millennials actually go so far as to demand more free time, shorter work weeks, dog therapy, multi-year sabbaticals, you name it. All the hip companies factor work-life balance into their hiring, offering everything from free yoga retreats to free-time Fridays to whatever ridiculous perk Google is offering right now to keep their drones aswim in hoodies and gummy bears for life.

Do not misunderstand: It’s a fabulous intention. Not overworking at the expense of your health, your family, your love life and your creative soul is a fine trend indeed. The Puritan work ethic has poisoned America for generations, and it needs to die, along with the savage Christian dogma that birthed it. But this new perception also entirely missed the point, no?

But wait, before we delve more into that: You know who doesn’t give a damn about work-life balance? Executives. Male executives, to be exact. They just don’t care all that much. And they’re not the slightest bit guilty about it.

Such is the observation of the Harvard Business Review, anyway, one of the coldest publications in existence. Their findings: most male execs prefer to work. In fact, they care about little else, largely because their blood has been replaced by antifreeze and their souls have been sucked away by business school, replaced by egomania, profit margins and high-functioning alcoholism.

Male executives think the whole work-life balance thing is — can you guess? That’s right: a woman’s problem. Something for their wives to figure out. These men just want to make lots of money. Get a sweet office. Wield lots of power. Control stuff. It’s just what business guys do. And then they die. To be forgotten almost instantly.

It’s the greatest irony, isn’t it? With the exception of politicians, no other species of human thinks they’re so powerful and important to the world, when they’re actually not.

Most executives come and go like drones. Their towering self-importance – to which all of society sadly contributes — is only matched by their imminent and nearly instantaneous irrelevance.


Not ALL male execs care only about work, of course. Just the sad ones.
Not ALL male execs care only about work, of course. Just the sad ones.

Put another way: Steve Ballmer will be forgotten in a week. A good parent, on the other hand, contributes tremendously to the health and well- being of society, by raising decent, adjusted, well-loved kids. Which is, of course, excruciatingly hard work, far more trying than any executive. Irony!

But let’s leave those poor execs out of it, and loop it back around. Because there’s something more sinister afoot here, and it’s more than just the fantasy ideal that, if you love what you do, it’s not supposed to be work.

Isn’t that what we hear is the ultimate goal? Ideally, life and work are supposed to play perfectly well together, even merge. Who needs work-life balance if they’re not really at odds? What you want is work-life synergy.

(Caveat: I admit to an unusual perspective in this regard. My life and work — yoga, writing, teaching, yoga philosophy, practice, retreats, books, et al — have been indistinguishable for years. It doesn’t matter the day or the hour or the season; there are no weekends, vacations or paid time off. Holidays are meaningless [I’m almost always teaching, somewhere]. Life and work are fused, intermingled, identical. I’m fortunate to say I’m nearly always doing something I want and/or love to do, when I want to do it, with people I care deeply about. Drawbacks? Plenty. But a vacation? From what?)

I realize this is not the way for most. Work is just… work. A grind. The thing you have to do. And the vast majority of people hate their jobs, or at best, tolerate them, with occasional glimpses of fun and real purpose. But given the choice and 10 million dollars, 90 percent would quit immediately.

But hasn’t something been lost in this new fetish for “balance?” Hasn’t the Puritan work ethic destroyed our perception of life to the point where we can’t even see how much healthier it might be to upend and eliminate the categories completely?

Let’s try and go straight at it: “Work-life balance” is a toxic distinction, inviting misery and stress, endless juggling and reconfigurations to try and get it “right,” where no right actually exists.

Maybe the hippies, the yogis, Einstein had it right when they say that everything is life — no matter what you’re doing, where you are, who you’re with — because everything is energy, vibration, movement. You can’t separate work from life anymore than you can separate water from a river.

The question, then, becomes more about where, energetically speaking, do you want to dwell? What sort of pulse and movement do you want to enjoy, through it all? Tortured and low, with the executives and the mind’s cruel categories, or up high, with the lovers, the synergists and the fools?


Email: Mark Morford

Mark Morford on Twitter and Facebook.

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2014/03/18/is-work-life-balance-a-lie
Report Spam   Logged

If you aren't living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space! 
Kiwithrottlejockey
Admin Staff
XNC2 GOD
*
Posts: 32232


Having fun in the hills!


« Reply #278 on: April 02, 2014, 10:40:19 pm »


Mark Morford

How to not murder your ex

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 4:19PM - Tuesday, April 01, 2014

SIMPLE RULES we live by. Basic laws we insist upon.

Zucchini is pointless. Orchids are fantastic. Politics will mutilate your soul. If you are not frequently complaining of overworked exhaustion and sort of resent your job and your life, you are a failed American.

Conversely, if someone asks, “How are you?” and you smile warmly and say, “I feel great and life is amazing,” something is clearly wrong with you and you should be shunned. I mean, obviously.

Breakups? Divorces? Vicious. Maybe even sociopathic. Ex-husbands/wives/lovers are, with rare exception, monsters, liars, destroyers of worlds. If you break up right — that is, adhering to the fine American traditions of victimhood, jealousy and mistrust — then you surely despise your former love, or at least secretly wish them a violent genital rash or a highly unpleasant death.

It’s true, no? Divorce in particular, we’ve all been trained to believe, is nearly always malicious and stained with lawyers. We’re Americans, after all: We relish emotional bloodshed. Animosity is essential. Cruelty, even better. It says so on TV.

Don’t believe it? Want to try something different? A kinder and more thoughtful, conscious way through? Good luck with that. You’re an idiot and a fool.




Or, you’re Gwyneth Paltrow.

Did you hear? Turns out Paltrow and her husband, Coldplay singer Chris Martin, are separating after a decade of marriage and two perky kids. What a shame. And so on.

But this is not the news. The news is that Paltrow dared to unleash a hateful new phrase upon the wary world in her announcement of the split, indicating the modality, the way in which she and Martin are going about their celebrity separation.

She said, “I am right now chopping up my two children with a chainsaw.” No, wait — that’s not right. That’s just what it seemed like she said, given the outpouring of bile she received. She actually said her and Martin’s split was to be a “conscious uncoupling”.

And thus did rain down upon her pretty blonde head a thundering bout of collective eye-rolling from here to the British tabloids, a firehose of disgust and vitriol not seen since, well, the last celebrity dared say something not to acceptable script.

The reaction was swift and bizarrely nasty. The nerve! It’s not enough to be rich and famous, marry a rock star and have two perfect kids and a touchy-feely website and an Oscar and get to kiss Robert Downey Jr. in blockbuster movies all the time. Now even your divorce is better than anyone else’s? How very precious.

This was the savage outcry. Thankfully, the New York Times stepped in to unleash its awesome powers of investigative research to locate the sweet pop psychotherapist (Katherine Woodward Thomas, chilling out in Costa Rica at the time the story broke) who coined “conscious uncoupling” a few years ago, borrowing it from her ex husband when they divorced; it was then apparently swiped by two of Paltrow’s “spiritual advisers” on her website, Goop.com, who say they got it from a flower petal unicorn daydream orgasm goddess workshop. Or something.

Doesn’t matter. Go read about it if you like. Thomas’ book deal is already pending and the phrase can take its own path to fame and imminent overuse.

But let’s just admit one thing outright: Regardless of source — and let’s be clear; the practice of compassion and consciousness in love and relationship far precedes self-help/pop psychology — I found “conscious uncoupling” completely fantastic, refreshing, contrarian, a big F-you to the inherent toxicity “breakup culture” lives by.

Roll your eyes all you want. But to separate with something resembling awareness, respect, love? To try and remove victimization and whiny, poor-me-ism from the equation? To see the other for their humanity and their offering? Yeah, sounds terrible.

Hey, it ain’t easy. I know the prickly fun to be had wallowing in heartbroken misery following a breakup, doubting you’ll ever find real love again, wondering if you’re worthless and doomed.

I know the savage pleasures to be had in nasty gossiping, in dissing your ex’s emotional instability and sexual shortcomings, in trashing their new lover, in scouring his/her Facebook feed for signs of cruelty and overt jerk-hood. On it goes.


Ah, simpler times.
Ah, simpler times.

What’s more, well do I know that feelings of anger and brutal loss can sometimes be warranted. If your ex is (was) abusive, a jerk, psychotic, a stone-cold liar, molested the cat, or stole your $35K Rolex and hid it in her vagina, you have reasonable grounds for a bit of, you know, enthusiastic severance, for blasting that sucker into the karmic ether. Do it, and do it well.

But that’s not always required. In fact, it might be far less frequently required than we’re trained to believe. Can you imagine?

I have some personal experience. I credit an ex girlfriend with teaching me this exact “uncoupling” lesson, years back, long before the term or the website or the outcry.

Back then, I did the expected thing. Upon breakup, I prepared for the worst: Emotional devastation. Spiritual severance. No speaking, no reaching out, gotta move on as fast and as indignantly as possible, or else. In short, I expected to feel miserable, angry and alone for many months to come because, well, it’s just what one does, right? I knew no other way.

She would have none of it. She gently informed me that we had no reason to antagonize each other, to feel spite or resentment. In fact, just the opposite — after a period of mourning, we could even support each other, champion each others’ work, talk as much as we wanted, remain dear friends and confidants, maybe even forever. What a concept.

First, I thought she was crazy. Then I thought she was a genius. Gratefully, the latter turned out to be true. (Thanks, Sera).

Hey, do what you want. Despise your ex all you like. Wallow and immolate and curse time and fate. I know how it is. But know this: cultural conditioning is a powerful thing. So powerful, we forget we have a choice. We forget that relationships don’t necessarily contain latent antagonism and misery — that’s our own invention. We make it up as we go. And we draw to us those who feel the same way.

But you know what? Victimization is easy. Reactivity, emotional melodrama, self-pity — also easy. Consciousness, tenderness and a deeper understanding? Working with change and loss without attaching a story of suffering to it? Hard. Very hard. I fail all the time.

Ironic, isn’t it? “Conscious uncoupling” only sounds fluffy and gooey. Like any practice that demands you defy the culture, your own personal bullshit and your ego’s conditioning, it will kick your ass. You know, in a good way. Someone tell Gwyneth.


Email: Mark Morford

Mark Morford on Twitter and Facebook.

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2014/04/01/how-to-not-murder-your-ex
Report Spam   Logged

If you aren't living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space! 

Pages: 1 ... 7 8 9 10 11 [12]   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Open XNC2 Smileys
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum


Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy
Page created in 0.052 seconds with 13 queries.