I’m feeling frustrated. Even sad and somewhat angry. Yet what I did yesterday evening was a practical, firm act of self-care and a concrete instance of putting one of my New Year’s resolutions into practice, i.e. “not pursuing unavailable relationships/situations”.
The plans for yesterday evening were that I was going to meet one of my best climbing buddies for an after-work session around 5pm and then go see the guy from the chorus with whom I had hooked up to “talk about our friendship” at 8:30pm. To do this, I was going to drive to two cities that are not where I live, each ~45 minutes drive for me and ~20-30 minutes drive from each other. Plans involving this amount of driving is quite common for many of us in this area so under normal circumstances it wouldn’t have been a big deal for me. Yesterday, however, we were getting the tail end of the winter storm we had over the long weekend and the weather conditions got progressively worse as the afternoon went by. By the time I left my place to head to the climbing engagement with my buddy, winds were gusting over 30 mph, snow accumulated on the sides of the main roads was being blown (often sideways) across the streets making the cars swerve and the lanes invisible, and snow & ice still covered the side roads. The forecast was for these conditions to last, and possibly worsen, until 11pm — which would have been about the time I would have been driving home from a long night out.
My car can take such winter conditions: it has excellent snow tires and AWD.
But I couldn’t take such conditions yesterday. (Part of my current increased sense of vulnerability is due to my recent surgery and the death of my pet snake.)
It was less than a 15-minute drive for me to the gas station to fill my tank and check the fluids in my car. And as I drove that short stretch I could feel a voice in me say “No”.
“No, you cannot do this tonight. It’s already bad now and it’s going to get even worse later. It isn’t worth it: your safety isn’t worth this. It isn’t worth you risking a car accident for this.”
I had been waiting a week for yesterday evening. I was so ready, so eager, both to climb with my buddy and to have the clarifying conversation with the guy from the chorus. I wanted those two things to happen so badly — all day I had been feeling like a sprinter on the starting-blocks just waiting for the gunshot to take off and go for it. But then yesterday evening, during that short drive in the tail end of the winter storm, something else kicked in for me: a sense of self-preservation, an “inner-love” towards myself that was stronger than the “outer-draw” towards either of those two guys.
I miss climbing or hiking or just hanging out with that climbing buddy. And I really, really wanted to get stuff off my chest and have some clarification with the guy from the chorus. But somehow I also felt that the care or interest that either of them is showing towards me now, towards having/maintaining a relationship with me now, is not strong enough, or not clear enough for me: my interest or care and effort towards maintaining relationships with each of them seems much stronger than theirs.
The friendship with my climbing buddy is, I trust, solid. Yet, due to circumstances this year we haven’t been able to climb together, or even see each other, as much as I would like to. And most of the time it’s me reaching out to him now to keep up the connection.
The situation with the guy from the chorus is murky and it’s definitely always me reaching out to him to initiate meeting up.
In both cases a clarifying conversation will be helpful — it is, I feel, necessary. But I won’t drive in a winter storm, risking a car accident, to have those conversations.
No matter how important those conversations — and possibly those relationships — may be, my personal incolumnity is more important: I guess I had never really felt that way so strongly or clearly until yesterday evening…
The Little Prince and the Fox 