The way is hard but worthy

I felt like I'd run face first into something when I awoke this morning. My eyes ached, my face ached, and my chest & throat still felt taut with hopelessness. I felt queasy and tight fear sent fingers down through my torso to my hips. I had not slept well at all after conversations full of hard truths. Although there are times when truth seems gentle and easy, this is a time when they the truth has a edgy hardness to it.

AM took me into the office, I wasn't really in any shape to ride in. Usually I'd have worked from home, but there was someone I'd worked with retiring today and I wanted to be there for the get together in her honor. I got through the morning, talking with people and trying to eat my oatmeal. When I came back to my desk for a meeting CK had sent me a text message.

She was coming downtown to look at a new office and asked if I wanted to have lunch. By the time she got there I'd finished a nearly two hour meeting to finalize some business requirements and my sinuses ached terribly. I was thinking of leaving early, trying to get my head around setting up the tools and building a database seemed impossible through the pain in my sinuses.

We walked down to Veganopolis. I ordered the African style peanut & yam soup and she got a pot pie. I was still felt queasy and picked at my soup. We talked a little, I felt the words coming haltingly, fighting up through the tension filling my torso. I felt some of the hopelessness lift as our words met.

I decided to take the afternoon off and we walked back to my office so I could let people know and grab my stuff. We took MAX over to the 7th Avenue and walked to her flat. One Zyrtec, two pseudoephedrine, two ibuprofen, and laying down on the bed close to CK helped to finally get the sinus headache under control. We kept talking, finding the way together again.

She brought my attention to my fear, the hopeless belief things are ending that bubbles up to the surface so quickly. It is an area where we run into each other emotionally. I withdraw into certainty that the end is here, the our relationship is over. I get lost in my fear and of no help to either of us.

It has been underneath things for me lately, that fear. When my relationship doesn't hit these bumps things are can be effortless, we just flow together. So much so that I have been having a undercurrent of fear that any moment now it will be taken away from me. I don't think I'd realized how constant that fear had become until we started talking about it.

Another rising, wordless, awful emotion stealing me away from the present moment. Like the others, this conviction that she is leaving me will have to be added to the list of emotions to monitor, to evaluate and re-frame so that I am able to stay present, able to see that I am OK. She spent a lot of time reminding me that she wants to find a way too, that she isn't leaving. Hearing it was like a balm.

We talked about finding a middle way in this. Sometimes we will need to regroup, maybe re-evaluate, maybe even sometimes go back a few steps to gain perspective. I laughed about our middle way, a way others find far out on the fringe and yet the practice for us is the same regardless. We observe the precepts, we look for markers of the way, we practice.