Call it evolution, enlightenment or a numbing to pleasures of my past but I find myself uncertain-of and examining the factors that lead to a fulfilling life for me. Growing up I was good at many things but that did not include being social with people my age. Naturally, being social with people my age was what I craved the most. This established a pattern/motivation for me that continued throughout most of my life and up until recently. Even still it’s not gone, but neither is it what it once was. We grow and our needs change. This is my reflection on what makes me tick, and what should do so moving forward.
We all need income, shelter, and food. It would be nice for my own work to provide this income and for this income to be used for food and shelter. Ideally, I’ll have a bit left over for the rest of what makes up life.
My life is empty without intellectual stimulation. I get some of this from my work although there were many years that I was in autopilot mode. I did my job and made decent money but that brain-itch wasn’t getting scratched. So work is one way to achieve this; others include writing, reading, philosophy, psychonauting, and trying new things.
These feed into my need to pursue integrity and personal growth. I’m not content to sit upon what I already know; sometimes what I know needs to be updated, modified, or discarded. I want to learn, evolve, grow, and change. Ideally, I change for the better but if something is not for the better than in the spirit of these words I will change again. Growth, coupled with intellectual stimulation, will help me feel that I have accomplished things I have set my mind to, and even some things I didn’t see coming and just picked up along the way. The destination truly is the journey, but being able to claim milestones along the way can also be encouraging and validating.
I want peace in my home. This includes basic creature comforts as well as a healthy and working interpersonal dynamic with anyone else sharing a roof with me. I’ve put a lot of work into my life, getting to where I am, and my home is my castle, my castle is my peace. I want it to stay that way.
I would like to travel, domestically and internationally. This has been complicated by my becoming a single dog daddy, but a little bit eased by sharing my space with two others. Sometimes I want to get a travel van, or something larger and set up a mobile life, but the notion of raising two energetic dogs in that environment challenges me. I have places I’d like to go in Europe, Africa, Asia. Trips could be a couple of weeks or a few months, provided finances allow and the pups are cared for.
I need community. Reflecting upon my life I have often been on the periphery of many scenes, sometimes diving in deeply but often instead on the fringe. I bring people from various worlds together but sometimes end up outside circles of my own creation. I see the activities and support and emotion from friends with their own tribes, and extended tribes, and wish for the same. I feel more that I currently have an extended tribe than a proximate one. This is something I continually work on.
Art and music feed my soul, both consuming and creating. I sometimes hit long lulls sometimes on the creation side but it never fully stops. I want to create visuals, I would like to start creating sound again. My work might be at a point where I will again have time and freedom to partake. Each month I need to create. Each month I need to participate in the art, performance, and music of others.
Sometimes I want recognition and a sense of identity, sometimes I embrace my trivial place amongst the stars and need no name. All my life I have used a moniker gifted to me by my parents; I don’t dislike it but this is not a name I personally chose. For the past few years I have presented with a modified last name, one inspired by my given middle name. This was partly a choice, but partly a remnant of a choice-not-my-own from decades ago. It’s hard to pick a name that will resonate now and also in an undetermined future. I’ll probably do another writing on this topic.
Routine is comfortable. Routine is easy. Routine is boring. I need variety. This has taken me into alternative subcultures. I looked for part of my soul in the moody shadows. I let adrenaline fly on the hockey rink. I’ve connected with people in co-creations of art. Sometimes the art has been a little sacrilegious, sometimes it’s involved nudity or edgy sensual situations. I want my life and exploration to be meaningful but I ask myself how much of that needs to be ‘edge’. To cease examining one’s frontier suggests to becoming stagnant, but frequently does this exploration need to take place? My mind doesn’t give me a break on such things, but I could choose factors in my life that help it find breaks at times.
While “community” describes a group dynamic, “friendship” is more individual. I have many, many acquaintances. I also have friends but I lack the richness of friendship that I know is possible. I see it in others, tempering my own longing for such while slowly trying to set factors right in my life to increase organic opportunities for the very same. I feel like I have impacted the lives of many people, directly or indirectly, and that a lot of people would be sad if my time on earth ended, but I also feel largely invisible on a daily basis. The idea of having a wheel of a community with individual spokes forged with solid friendships is appealing, even while elusive.
They say you have nothing if not your health. It’s easy to trivialize this until you no longer have your health. I have a bad back and I need to work on my core strength. There have been rare instances where the pain has been debilitating to the point of being unable to stand. It’s in those moments that I appreciate being able to move, even if through pain. We only get one body and while we age, while we batter and bruise this flesh vessel throughout life, we have to honor it lest we pay the price. Perhaps we pay the price and do not count the cost; even that should be a choice but know that it’s a price paid both by the you-of-the-now as well as every future-you to come.
Over these past few years, I have grown to value my personal space and personal time more than ever before. I work alone and so much of my non-work intent is to find social situations, to connect with humanity, but this extra time I’ve had to myself has increased my appreciation for me-time. I likely approached co-dependency at points in the past; now I am my own independent world, a fully autonomous human, that is open to off-world exploration with other such humans. I’ll return to my space, my time, and I’ll reflect, I’ll write, I’ll process, I’ll integrate, I’ll change. I’m shaping solitude, changing it from loneliness into profitable solo reflection and recharging time.
This chapter of my personal user manual wouldn’t be complete without my thoughts on intimate companionship. This has been a topic that has consumed a lot of my bandwidth in recent years. I grew up monogamous. I opened my mind and my world to more flexible types of relationships but stopped short of exploring polyamory in practice. Mere months after getting married I was presented with the choice to try-and-succeed with polyamory or to no longer be married. I spent a long time and a huge amount of emotional effort giving polyamory a sincere integrative experience.
Polyamory is a big word that means a lot of things, each depending on the circumstance. Sometimes people date together as a cohesive group. Sometimes each relationship branch exists in its own little bubble. There are chains, V’s, spider-web shapes. There are isolated relationships and there are ‘kitchen-table’ dynamics where metamours (various people who share a common poly-partner) interact and form friendships. There is non-hierarchical polyamory, solo polyamory, and relationship anarchy. For a while now I have felt more and more pull towards the last two of those.
Solo polyamory means not being beholden to any partner any more than you personally choose to commit to, and having the freedom and flexibility to form any relationship you want, meaningful or not. Usually, solo-poly practioners will live alone and engage others as they desire, on their own terms. Relationship anarchy is somewhat similar but it allows for flexibilities in things like primariness and living arrangements, as well as shifts in how these both play out over time. The idea is to live an authentic live with the understanding that the winds of change may present another life in the future that feels more authentic, and having given oneself the forechosen grace to be able to act upon that. This might mean leaving relationships or changing them, but neither solo polyamory nor relationship anarchy would likely lend themselves to making a temporally open-ended commitment to someone such as marriage.
I have embraced the notion of freely engaging others as is right for all involved. I’ve worked through processing jealous feelings and, for myself, largely separated them from physical acts, relegating them instead towards the honoring of boundaries, commitments, and promises. As I’ve examined what is right for myself I have also stepped into another even less-known phrase: ambiamory. If in relationship, an ambiamorous person can be content in either polyamorous or monogamous dynamics. In short, they want to be happy and the shape it takes is less important. I think I could do either and I’d like to explore factors that are important to me in intimate relationships.
I really like the idea of being someone’s primary person, and them being mine. A mutual commitment towards a shared vision in life, with shared and loving means to get there. I also like the notion of breaking social tradition and being open-minded on this matter, but I seem to return to the idea of really enjoying the notion of a shared-life partnership. This includes the benefits of relatively consistent love, support, cohabitation, finance sharing, laughter, trust, commitment, adventure, and touch. As per above this also includes room for personal time and space, community, and friendship.
The older I get, the more confusing sexuality becomes to me. As an awkward kid, I placed far too much value on this type of connection and acceptance. Sensuality was a deep and spiritual matter, a sacred show of desire and acceptance. It has, over the years, also revealed itself as a space for connection, casual fun, and personal exploration. I fully respect that others have varied experiences that need to be respected. Some have traumas, some have a more cavalier approach than I do. However this topic plays out in my life, everything needs to be enthusiastically mutual.
I love sharing space and passionate emotion with others, but as my perspective matures, as my mind sheds its past conditioning and becomes open to and more aware of a greater variety of genuine and sincere expressions of value, I learn that the way my soul soars while holding a friend and talking philosophy, or watching a movie, can rival the brain-chemical rise of physical intimacy or exceed it. It does so without expectation, with no pressure, with a purity of enjoying the person I’m with for who they are. I welcome what is naturally there. I want none of what isn’t naturally chosen. Those physical moments can be wonderful but they are also fleeting, albeit with lasting effects.
I am presently living at peace as a polyamorous man, one considering ambiamory. I have a feeling that my ideal relationship shape would ultimately be a mutual primary-ness, with openness to quality gender-agnostic connections with others, but also largely with non-primary explorations being experiences that are shared with my partner, something we’d lean into and cherish together. I had something like this years ago before I explored polyamory. I’m sure I’d approach it differently now, better, should the opportunity arise again. It’s quite possible that trying that mindset on, in practice, would feel limiting now that I’ve polyamoried for so long (at least conceptually, even if shorter in actual post-pandemic personal dating practice).
I like the phrase “Excess in moderation”. My intention is to put everything in my life in its right place and at the right time, with the goal of elevating and feeding my spirit and having a similar effect on others. Sometimes that means embracing some chaos, perhaps within a little structure. You have just read this and now you have the structure for me and a lot of what motivates me.