Managing the Distance
Oct. 20th, 2011 12:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cedar_groveFrom The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have.
After all the trouble we go through to find each other, we must wait over and over for our loved ones to break through with their wisdom.
This is one of those posts that I don't like to do and try to avoid too many of, so… apologies for that right from the off.
The key word in that up there I think is wisdom - not emotions, not needs, not frustrations… not anything that leads to making value statements or judgements… and I think that's a tough cookie of a challenge sometimes.
Recently making the switch between being there with Mir, and a physical part of our relationship, to being here with Mir when I came back to UK, I found myself taking a step back to avoid falling under my own emotions/judgement and to just fall back into the routines of things. It's been a slow adjustment this time around, maybe because we were together for so long this last time? Not that I'm in any way complaining about that – if I had my way we'd be together all the time like any normal couple – just that it makes a difference to switching from being a couple together, and a couple apart.
I'll be the first to hold up my hand these days and admit that I'm a demanding person, that's demanding of attention more than anything else… it's not necessarily the way I want to be, it just happens to be the truth, and I'm sure if I were not so damned insecure about some things it wouldn't be like that. So yes, when we're together, I take up a lot of time… especially when I'm asked 'what do you want to do?' because there's this little voice in the back of my head that says, …you're only together for so long… you should do something together…. when maybe what I really want to do is to… read a book, or watch something on the TV that Mir doesn't particularly care for… *shrug* just examples pulled from the top of my head, not necessarily things that were what I want/wanted. So I end up demanding of time where maybe we each of us wanted to do things 'together by ourselves.' Is that because I'm afraid to cause hurt feelings by saying I want to do something that doesn't necessarily involve Mir? Perhaps. So yes, I'll own the criticism there that says there were things that Mir or I wanted to do, and because I never said "lets… x, y or z," we never got to do those things.
Now I'm back here, with a five hour time difference, back to the 'how the hell do you do it' distance relationship. Yep, there are certain things that need to be done while it's still light and/or business hours, and that's fine and easy to deal with. It's a different routine when I'm back here in the UK. Yes, I want to spend time online with Mir, doing what we can do together, because hell, how else can we even approximate the normal routines of coming home to each other… finding out about each other's day, all that jazz, but I don't mean to keep her tied to the Skype window or the moo window or any other window we're sharing. It's actually comforting for me to know she's doing her own stuff, and every now and then dropping a comment into whatever window is appropriate. Things are still getting done, and we're still sharing time together. That's the important thing, right, because I love her very much and she loves me. Because of that I do honestly and truly mean to be in bed on time, by midnight (little Cinderella, me), because then it means I'm rested enough not to be dead tired the next day, and that Mir has time to do things in the early evening. That's how it's supposed to work so that's how it's gonna have to work.
I've been reading actual print books (though that's not necessarily relevant – it could just as easily be an E-book I suppose) for those couple of hours of a night time that we're online together, because that's easier for me to stop and go back to after giving attention to the shared windows, so that Mir's not waiting on my response to something, and being held up by me. On the day's I've done that, it's mostly worked to get me to bed on time like I want for both of us… and it means I'm getting some reading done, which is a good thing as I have a lot of reading to do.
We do the best we can – does that explain 'how the hell we do it?'
Show yourself
and I will swim to you.
After all the trouble we go through to find each other, we must wait over and over for our loved ones to break through with their wisdom.
This is one of those posts that I don't like to do and try to avoid too many of, so… apologies for that right from the off.
The key word in that up there I think is wisdom - not emotions, not needs, not frustrations… not anything that leads to making value statements or judgements… and I think that's a tough cookie of a challenge sometimes.
Recently making the switch between being there with Mir, and a physical part of our relationship, to being here with Mir when I came back to UK, I found myself taking a step back to avoid falling under my own emotions/judgement and to just fall back into the routines of things. It's been a slow adjustment this time around, maybe because we were together for so long this last time? Not that I'm in any way complaining about that – if I had my way we'd be together all the time like any normal couple – just that it makes a difference to switching from being a couple together, and a couple apart.
I'll be the first to hold up my hand these days and admit that I'm a demanding person, that's demanding of attention more than anything else… it's not necessarily the way I want to be, it just happens to be the truth, and I'm sure if I were not so damned insecure about some things it wouldn't be like that. So yes, when we're together, I take up a lot of time… especially when I'm asked 'what do you want to do?' because there's this little voice in the back of my head that says, …you're only together for so long… you should do something together…. when maybe what I really want to do is to… read a book, or watch something on the TV that Mir doesn't particularly care for… *shrug* just examples pulled from the top of my head, not necessarily things that were what I want/wanted. So I end up demanding of time where maybe we each of us wanted to do things 'together by ourselves.' Is that because I'm afraid to cause hurt feelings by saying I want to do something that doesn't necessarily involve Mir? Perhaps. So yes, I'll own the criticism there that says there were things that Mir or I wanted to do, and because I never said "lets… x, y or z," we never got to do those things.
Now I'm back here, with a five hour time difference, back to the 'how the hell do you do it' distance relationship. Yep, there are certain things that need to be done while it's still light and/or business hours, and that's fine and easy to deal with. It's a different routine when I'm back here in the UK. Yes, I want to spend time online with Mir, doing what we can do together, because hell, how else can we even approximate the normal routines of coming home to each other… finding out about each other's day, all that jazz, but I don't mean to keep her tied to the Skype window or the moo window or any other window we're sharing. It's actually comforting for me to know she's doing her own stuff, and every now and then dropping a comment into whatever window is appropriate. Things are still getting done, and we're still sharing time together. That's the important thing, right, because I love her very much and she loves me. Because of that I do honestly and truly mean to be in bed on time, by midnight (little Cinderella, me), because then it means I'm rested enough not to be dead tired the next day, and that Mir has time to do things in the early evening. That's how it's supposed to work so that's how it's gonna have to work.
I've been reading actual print books (though that's not necessarily relevant – it could just as easily be an E-book I suppose) for those couple of hours of a night time that we're online together, because that's easier for me to stop and go back to after giving attention to the shared windows, so that Mir's not waiting on my response to something, and being held up by me. On the day's I've done that, it's mostly worked to get me to bed on time like I want for both of us… and it means I'm getting some reading done, which is a good thing as I have a lot of reading to do.
We do the best we can – does that explain 'how the hell we do it?'
