Hike 8: Kennesaw Mountain Kolb Farm Loop

Yesterday, I hiked at Kennesaw Mountain. Lately, I've been hiking out of the area covered by my year long hiking project; I camped and hiked with Livy and my mom at Cheaha State Park in Alabama, and I did a piece of the Appalachian Trail because I wanted to see the fall leaves. But yesterday, I was back into my regular life hiking, so after I took Livy to her classes, I went the Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park.

The Kolb Farm loop is 6 miles (I did a little more) and runs from the Illinois Monument at Cheatam Hill down to Kolb Farm and back. It's flatter than the part that goes over the mountain and less wooded. I really like the open fields and meadows, especially in fall when the native grasses are so beautiful. One of my favorite views is from the top of a hill, looking down over a meadow partially gone to pines. The trees at the end of the meadow were aflame with beautiful color, and the path at the top of the hill sweeps around the highest part of the meadow in a lovely curve. Whenever I walk it, I imagine I am one of the Dashwoods, and we stop here to discuss the picturesque view, and perhaps Elinor draws it.

When Edward says,"I call it a very fine country -- the hills are steep, the woods seem full of fine timber, and the valley looks comfortable and snug -- with rich meadows and several neat farm houses scattered here and there. It exactly answers my idea of a fine country, because it unites beauty with utility," I think of the Kolb Farm Loop and the Shenandoah Valley part of the Appalachian Trail and Skyline Drive. I think I agree with Edward. I love the look of beautiful settings, but touched by human hands, made sacred by love and work and people living their beautiful lives. My broodings of human interaction with Kennesaw Mountain, though, are sometimes less lovely. I can also imagine the death and misery that happened here during the Civil War, and as I've gotten older, the death seems worse because I imagine how many of them were practically children. A hike here is always sobering to me, as well as lovely.

My hiking yesterday was broody, but not over long ago wars. I was hiking myself into a state of calmness. When my mind is unsettled, nothing is so necessary to me as walking. The farther I walk, the more resigned to the reality of things I get and the more peaceful I become and the more sure I am of being reasonable. Walking seems to push me, not just over miles of actual terrain, but over miles of feelings and thoughts. I walk right through my strong feelings; I feel them completely but with the support of the trees and the path under my feet. I walk out the other side of them into a clearer mind where I can consider facts and ideas carefully and in a measured way. Feeling my feet on the ground and the air in my lungs prevents me from floating away from the real concrete things that are a part of mental disquiet: my feelings, the things in the world that have happened, my actions and their consequences.

But the movement, the walking, the expansive outdoors prevents the opposite as well; I cannot get stuck in the same old details or in myself when I am walking. It is too clear on a path that most of the thngs in the world aren't about me. The woods were here long ago. The meadows weren't cleared for me. The path is well-worn by other feet, and if I never walked it again, it would continue to the place it goes. The sky and the birds and the dirt and the horses that pass do not know me. My concerns are important to me, but they aren't universally important. I can rest in the calm knowledge that, though decisions are hard and understanding things is difficult, my decisions are not SO important. They are only important to me. Hiking makes me understand my place in the world more clearly.

I walked out of the woods more reasonable, calmer, and therefore more capable of real love and real thinking than when I walked in.

Should I Be Back On Facebook?: Learning Not to Be an Altruist

I am kind of an accidental altruist. It might not be news to those who know me well, but it has been news to me, in that "Hey guys I'm gay." "Well, duh." kind of way.

I've learned that I have a strong tendency to be care-taking people in a kind of co-dependent way, and now that I have identified this tendency, I see its fruits all over my life. I withdrew from Facebook in order to tighten in my social circle, allow myself to regroup, and take time to figure this out. I've learned a few good lessons so far:

When people ask for help and agree on what their needs are, helping can be a good thing. But when I decide what I think people need and help them without their consent, that's kind of creepy.

When helping feels good to and benefits everyone, helping can be a good thing. But when helping someone leads me to feel resentment or exhaustion or pain or distress, the helping becomes an act of self-destruction.

And maybe most importantly, when helping comes from a solid core of self-worth and belief in one's loveableness and value, helping is a pure offering from generosity and benevolence. But when I help because that is the proof of my value, the necessary condition of being worthwhile or loveable, or the thing that prevents abandonment, the helping becomes impure, an offering not to the person being helped, but to my own inner demons.

So I got off Facebook, and it helped. The silence helped me focus on myself. I found that many of the triggers to be helping people in unhealthy ways were removed. I just didn't have to see the expectations of others, and so, I didn't have to face the difficulty of saying no and telling the inner demons to hush up. I didn't have to see evidence that made me think people needed my help, and so, I didn't have to fight the urge to help them in unhealthy ways. Having a tighter circle felt like training wheels: I could practice on relationships where I felt the most confident, committed, and supported in my new habits.

But now, I kind of want to come back. Partly because I am lonely. Aaron is working a lot, and I want a little more contact with my tight circle than I have. And I miss seeing some of the people I know less well: the pictures, the travels, the thoughts, the books. Partly, I want to test my new resolves in a bigger arena. Can I maintain these new behaviors in a setting that's harder?

I don't know the right answer about whether I should come back. But I think I will try it. If I find that I am not ready, I have new info and will pull back again and keep the training wheels a bit longer. If it goes well, I will find new ways to use Facebook that don't push me back into my caretaking habits. I'm just going to take the plunge and see what happens.

A side note is that I spent more time reading and writing (on this blog again!) without Facebook, and I liked that change. I'll see what happens with my time and my intellectal pursuits as well in this experiment.

DisIdentification with Cheerfulness

This morning, I am feeling blah, just kind of lethargic and uninterested and mildly gloomy. As I casually worked in the kitchen, I said to myself, "I just don't feel like myself today."

Luckily, I caught myself and thought, "That doesn't make sense. You are obviously yourself right now. Say a more realistic thing." The true thing is that I usually feel cheerful and interested in many things and excited to start my day and motivated about the work I will do in it. But I also sometimes feel less cheerful, even morose. I feel a variety of things, and none of them define my identity in some fixed way. My identity (if it even makes sense to talk about it, not sure yet) is constantly in flux. Sometimes I feel one thing, sometimes another.

What I was practicing was disintentification--not defining myself by one characteristic, cheerfulness, and calling another characteristic alien. I was practicing not categorizing every experience (my own experiences!) as me or not me.

Why does it matter? I have a habit, one that is shared by many people, I think, of deciding what I am and assuming that I will always be that. I tend to imagine that there is some unchanging essence that is my core, my unchanging self. I don't actually think that belief tracks with the evidence. My personality has shifted in subtle and in obvious ways. My beliefs and values have changed. My emotions change, not just in the moment; over time, the proportions, intensity, and physical manifestations of my emotions have changed. I can't imagine what the core of me could possibly be beyond these things that obviously change.

When these changes happen, my feeling that the changes are wrong somehow, unnatural, catastrophic, that they mean a painful shift to being an entirely new person with a new identity that must be understood (because it too must be fixed) causes me a lot of pain and suffering, the suffering of not actually believing and acting on a true thing. If my identity cannot be nailed down in this fixed way, being out of sync with that truth would of course cause me distress. It's not fun when the things that happen are not in accordance with one's model of reality, especially when we don't change the model as quick as may be.

So this morning, I worked on my model. I disidentified with cheerfulness, reminded myself that I feel many things, embraced a melancholy mood as a part of myself, and looked impermanence squarely in the face. And because thinking in accordance with the actual evidence is so pleasurable, I feel a little bit more cheerful.