Here are some highlights from past blogs I have failed to maintain over time:
On Home
I have been pondering the concept of home lately, prompted by a blog entry by my friend Eileen. She expressed dissatisfaction with her current apartment, and wondered if she moved some furniture around and made some changes, would she feel less grumpy about the matter. Her blog entry reminded me how important the concept of home is in our everyday lives.
A home can be our mental and emotional respite from the tumult and uncertainty we regularly face. Our home is our shelter in a storm. When we leave our home each morning and head to work, we leave behind the warmth and reliability of a home in which we are in charge and where everything is how we want it to be.
Our bed is the center of our home. Under its covers is where we feel safest and most secure. We hide from the world underneath our covers — being underneath them wards us from the unwanted and the unknown. Our home is where we return at the end of a day. Our bed is where we return at the end of a journey. No matter how bad it gets outside, no matter how uncertain life becomes, when we have a home of which we are proud and in which we feel safe, all can be “ok” for us in our heads, if only for a short rest.
When we have conflict in our home, we cannot feel like we are home. When we do not like where we live, we cannot feel like we are home. When our surroundings fail to bring us comfort and security, we cannot feel like we are home, depriving us of a critical equilibrium for our soul.
For some, the concept of home can be manifestly achieved internally. Certainly, the concept of home is applicable in the physical, the metaphysical, and the emotional spaces. For me, however, the tactile pleasure of being home is most strongly felt within the physical reality of the house I’ve come to love.
On Love
I had an interesting discussion today with my office mate, Sue, about conflict in meaningful relationships. I espoused the idea of conflict as pre-evolved behavior — unnecessary and wholly avoidable.
Conflict is avoided by being open and honest with your partner at all times, compromising for appeasement’s sake or to enable happiness, and by being cognizant of, and sensitive to, your partner’s discomfort or neuroses in certain situations. It is avoided by paying attention to your partner and how she reacts as you go through life together. It is avoided by respecting your partner’s boundaries and by ensuring you reconcile co-dependency with independency, as both are critical to establish in any long-term relationship.
Where conflict exists, it is often because we failed in one or more of these efforts. Being a really good friend — being the best partner you can be — is about ensuring you are constantly striving for the ideal. I don’t mean to imply absolutes, and striving for the ideal often means failing along the way. But conflict among friends and lovers is, to me, a result of not being good enough, of not trying hard enough, or of being too self-involved.
We can all be better friends and better partners. We can all achieve the ideal, and when we do, the stress dissipates, and in its place our efforts are rewarded with smiles, with laughter, and with warmth.
On Boris Pasternak
When you walk into my home, one of the first things you notice is my piano, on which sits a book of compositions by Alexander Scriabin. Scriabin’s neighbor in Moscow was a young Boris Pasternak. Pasternak (1890-1960) was a poet, a novelist (“Doctor Zhivago” being his most famous work among Westerners; it was not published in Russia until 28 years after his death), a musician, a scholar, and a social philospher. Like Shostakovich, Akhmatova, the young Yevtushenko, and all the other formalists (and pre-formalists, like Pasternak, born of an age before the Revolution; Pasternak is considered by scholars to be originally of the “futurist” school), Pasternak suffered under Stalin’s heavy, inconsistent, and terrifying rule. In his writings we find a man who has lived a joyless life, “colored grey” (Shostakovich’s phrase as reported by Volkov) by the day-to-day fear of being thrown into the gulag by the authorities whose rule he criticized. Pasternak was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature, “for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition“. Khruschev refused to allow him to accept the award, and it was not picked up until 1989, by his son Evgeny.
Pasternak died today, May 30, 1960.
